 |
| Click image to view larger |
Date: 1822
Format: Lithograph sent in letter, accompanied by a poem
Description: William Buckland enters Kirkdale Cave and is greeted by a pack of prehistoric hyenas.
In 1821 a cave was discovered by quarriers in Yorkshire. The cave, dubbed Kirkdale, was full of the bones of hyenas, elephants, rhinoceroses, and a number of other animals. It was not the first time that such un-British animals had been found in a British cave, but it attracted the attention of William Buckland, who explored the cave the same year. Mixtures of unusual animal bones in caves were generally taken as evidence for the Great Flood up to that point, but Buckland (who was certainly comfortable melding geology and religion) noted that the bones had been gnawed, and that fossilized excrement found in the cave looked very much like a hyena's. He concluded that the cave had been a prehistoric hyena den. The other animals had been the hyena's food, dragged into the cave. The role of the Great Flood was relegating to merely killing the hyena and leaving on top of their bodies a layer of mud. In other words, he had reconstructed an ecosystem for Britain before the Great Flood that was vastly different from the current ecosystem. Buckland's description of Kirkdale Cave was an important moment in the establishment of his reputation, and kicked off his interest in coprolites.
Conybeare's drawing imagines Buckland crawling into the cave and coming face-to-face with the hyena. In a sense, Buckland's research had brought this ancient ecosystem back to life. In Rudwick's (1992) interpretation, "Into the cave crawls Buckland himself, candle in hand, illuminating this scene from deep time with the light of science, penetrating the epistemic barrier between the human world and the prehuman, and looking perhaps as surprised to see the hyenas as they are to see him. Buckland's lectures were famous - or, to his more staid colleague, notorious - for his humorous impersonations of his extinct creatures. So this scene from deep 'antediluvial' time is made conceivable by being at the same time a scene of the amiable eccentric Buckland crawling ino the cave like one of his hyenas. [...] Buckland's reconstruction [...] becomes a keyhole [...] allowing us at least to "spy" a glimpse of a lost world that would otherwise be inaccessible forever."
As an aside, in the 1950s Immanuel Velikovosky would resurrect the idea that mixed bones in British caves were deposits from some global flood, in service to his unique ideas about axial tilt and earth/comet interactions.
Conybeare's illustration was accompanied by a poem he had written (reproduced in Pemberton (2010); footnotes mine):
Trophonius1, ‘tis said, had a den,
Into which whoso once dared to enter
Returned to the daylight again
With his wits jostled off their right centre.
But of all the miraculous caves,
And of all their miraculous stories,
Kirby Hole all its brethren outbraves,
With Buckland to tell of its glories.
Bucklandus ipse loquitur.2
Ages long ere this planet was formed,
(I beg pardon, before it was drowned,)3
Fierce and fell were the monsters that swarmed,
Roared and rolled in these hollows profound.
Their teeth had the temper of steel,
Skulls and dry bones they swallowed with zest, or
Mammoth tusks they despatched at a meal,
And their guts were like Papin’s Digester.4
And they munched ‘em just like Byron’s dog,
Tartar’s skulls that so daintily mumbled;5
Horns and hoofs were to them glorious prog6
Ecce Signa7—see how they’re all jumbled.
I can shew you the fragments half gnawed,
Their own Album Graecum8 I’ve spied,
And here are the bones that they pawed
And polished in scratching their hide.
So unbreeched Caledonians9 wear out
Each milestone they pass as they go,
So the lip of the pilgrim devout
Has kissed off St. Peter’s great toe.10
I know how they fared every day,11
Can tell Sunday’s from Saturday’s dinner;
What rants12 they devourèd, can say,13
When the game of the forest grew thinner.
Young elk of the bogs was a meat
That each common hunt might obtain;
But an elephant’s haunch was a treat
They only could hope now and then.
In scarce winters they sliced up each other,
So gaunt mariners, struggling with ruin,
Cast lots for each famishing brother,
For particulars, vide Don Juan.14
Mystic cavern! the gloom of thy cell,
Shedding light on each point that was dark,
Tells the hour by Shrewsbury clock
When Noah went into the ark.
By the crust on thy stalactite floor,
The post-Adamite ages I’ve reckoned,
Summed their years, days, and hours, and more,
And I find it comes right to a second.15
Mystic cavern! thy charms sublime
All the chasms of history supply;
What was done ere the birthday of time
Through one other such hole I could spy.
Footnotes:
1: Trophonius was a Greek hero who fled into a cave, and that cave became an oracle. Entering into the cave was evidently a frightening experience. See Victorian Web [victorianweb.org].
2: "Buckland himself speaks"
3: i.e., in the Great Flood.
4: An early pressure-cooker. See here [chemistryworld.com].
5: A reference to Byron's poem, "The Siege of Corinth" in which dogs eat the dead: From a Tartar’s scull they had stripp’d the flesh/ As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh
6: Old slang; food received by begging
7: "Behold the proof"
8: Feces of dogs and hyenaes turned white by oxidation
9: "Caledonia" is a poetic name for Scotland; "Breeching" was the right-of-passage where a boy wore pants for the first time. Alternatively, perhaps it is a reference to Scotland's affinity for kilts? Or else it is a reference to young Scottish boys. I have no idea why either young or adult scotsmen should wear down mile markers.
10: The right foot of the statue of St. Peter in St. Peter's Basilica has been worn smooth by the kisses and touching of pilgrims over hundreds of years. In other words, the bones in Kirkdale have been worn down by hyena similarly to how pilgrims have worn down St. Peter's foot.
11: Fared as in "ate". Maybe a pun.
12: No idea.
13: Two lines were footnoted here:
For rats and mice, and such small deer,
Had been Tom’s food for many a year.
Who or what Tom might have been is not stated.
14: "Vide" is Latin for "see" or "read"; "Don Juan" is a reference to canto II of Byron's poem "Don Juan", in which the character is shipwrecked and the sailors cast lots to determine who will be eaten.
15: Of course, Conybeare did not know that flowstone crusts would eventually be used for precise Uranium/Thorium dating, but how fortuitous a rhyme!
For more information about Buckland see his entry on the biography page.
For more about Conybeare, see his entry.
>> Return to Table of Contents
Sources & further discussion:
Pemberton, S. G. (2010). History of Ichnology: The Reverend William Buckland (1784–1856) and the Fugitive Poets. Ichnos, 17(4), 246-263. Link [tandfonline.com]
Rudwick, M. J. (1992). Scenes from deep time: early pictorial representations of the prehistoric world. University of Chicago Press.
McFarlane, D. A., & Ford, D. C. (1998). The age of the Kirkdale Cave palaeofauna. Cave and Karst Science, 25(1), 3-6.
A brief outline of the cave's history and debate over its fossils, plus some new (in 1998) U/Th dates.
Jaf Akst. (Dec. 1, 2011). The Hyena Den, discovered 1821. Post in The Scientist. Link [the-scientist.com]
The print reproduced with proper subtitle (but covered in watermarks) from a letter sent by Buckland: The British Library Board collection [imagesonline.bl.uk]
Image yoinked from:
Bressan, D. (Oct. 20, 2010). "Taphonomy of Cave Environments" on the History of Geology blog. Link [historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com]
No comments:
Post a Comment