CHRIS KOENIG returns to the eccentric Victorian clergyman and professor, William Buckland

More about William Buckland, the Oxford don who helped himself to the heart of the King of France - preserved in a silver casket at Nuneham Courtenay - and ate it.

He cropped up in this column recently, but as both a formidable academic and an eccentric of the first water, he deserves more space.

A clergyman, he became a Fellow of Corpus in 1809 and the first professor of geology in 1819, a canon of Christ Church in 1825 and Dean of Westminster in 1825. But anyone interested in his extraordinary habits, particularly his diet, should turn to the Rev W. Tuckwell's Reminiscences of Oxford.

The author was a childhood friend of Prof Buckland's son Frank - and never forgot the food at the Canon's house in Tom Quad. He wrote: "horse flesh I remember more than once, crocodile another day, mice baked in batter on a third - while the guinea pig under the table nibbled at your infantine toes, the bear walked round your chair and rasped your hand with file-like tongue, the jackal's fiendish yell close by came through the open window, the monkey's hairy arm extended itself suddenly over your shoulder to annex your fruit and walnuts".

This son, Frank, grew up to become a naturalist only a little behind his father in the league table of Oxford oddities. He went about with his pockets full of glow worms and moss - because he said it was good for them - and he won the disfavour of the Dean of Christ Church when an eagle of his flew into the cathedral during the Te Deum.

Stuffier Victorians were left unamused, too, when Frank took Tiglath Pileser, dressed as a Student of Christ Church, to a party at the Botanic Garden. The problem here was that Tiglath Pileser was a bear!

The Dean told him straight: "Mr Buckland. I hear you keep a bear in the college; well, either you or your bear must go."

Prof Buckland did himself no favours with the Catholic hierarchy in Palermo, where he went on honeymoon.

When the priests reverently opened up the reliquary to show him the remains of the city's patron saint, Rosalia, he shouted out: "They are the bones of a goat, not of a woman."

Then there was the time he visited "a foreign cathedral where was exhibited a martyr's blood - dark spots upon the pavement ever fresh and ineradicable. The professor dropped on the pavement and touched the stain with his tongue: 'I can tell you what it is; it is bat's urine'".

By that time he was well into eating his way through the whole animal creation, declaring that the worst thing to eat was a mole. As for the incident of the King of France's heart (reputedly Louis XIV's), shown to him by Lord Harcourt, A.J.C. Hare relates in his book The Story of My Life: "Dr Buckland, whilst looking at it, exclaimed: 'I have eaten strange things but have never eaten the heart of a king before,' and before anyone could hinder him he had gobbled it up, and the precious relic was lost forever."

He ended his days as Rector of Islip, where he is buried, and where Tiglath Pileser raided the sweet shop. Islip, of course, was in the early 11th century the birthplace of another king, Edward the Confessor, who gave the manor to Westminster Abbey.