[6] She saw no contradiction in using fancy to present fact, writing of the natural world: "Can any magic tale be more marvellous, or any thought grander, or more sublime than this?
[10] Like many writers in her time, she was trying to distance science from the mechanistic and materialistic philosophies it was sometimes connected to, and promoted it in moralistic terms: learning is presented as a means to become not only knowledgeable, but morally good.
This places it in the tradition of books such as Charles Kingsley's Glaucus or the Wonders of the Shore (1855) which ignited the Victorian craze for the popular pursuit of the natural world, seen in a framework of what has been called 'muscular christianity'.
In her 1883 work, Winners in Life's Race, she argued that morality was “not a special gift to human beings, as Christians might like to believe, but a gradual development through the animal world.”[11] However, Buckley veered away from this hyper-masculinised narrative of nature and science.
She tended to avoid technical language, such as the mechanisms of natural selection, and instead use narrative and metaphor to reach a more inclusive, wider audience, than ever before witnessed in the field.