-------- BEATRIX POTTER BOILED PETER RABBIT By Bill Hoffman The beloved children's author who created the charming Peter Rabbit Stories and drawings regularly slaughtered, boiled and dissected bunnies she caught in her yard, new documents reveal. Writer Beatrix Potter also captured foxes and frogs, knocked them out with chloroform and cut them open with a scalpel. The dark side of the woman who created such gentle animal characters as Squirrel Nutkin, Mr.Tod and Jeremy Fisher is revealed in a series of Potter's unreleased journals that will be sold at Christie's Manhattan auction house on Apri1 16. Potter was a talented biologist who turned to writing kiddie books because 19th-century scientists refused to take women researchers seriously, historians say. To make sure her drawings and descriptions of her characters were accurate, Potter adopted scientific dispassion to trap and kill animals to study. According to her journals, she: [] Butchered a pet bunny she'd named "Peter Rabbit", boiled its carcass and studied its organs to help her create her world-famous character of the same name. [] Shot a squirrel out of a tree so she could study it as a model for her Squirrel Nutkin character. [] Chloroformed a bullfrog, then dissected it to help her create Jeremy Fisher, the bungling frog who goes fishing and almost gets devoured by a hungry trout. [] Trapped and killed insects and butterflies to examine their wing structure under the microscope. While it seems creepy that Potter could create such delightful children's fiction by carving up small animals, her fans insist she was anything but a weirdo. "She was a superb naturalist", said Judy Taylor, chairman of the Beatrix Potter Society. "Her books meant she needed to know how animals worked." English Professor Julia Briggs said Potter was fascinated by animal anatomy, as were many Victorians of her day. "I am sure she was not cruel. Her drawings helped create some of the most beautiful children's books in the English language today", Briggs said. The Linnean Society, the renowned 209-year-old scientific association, once broke Potter's heart by rejecting her writings on biology. But the society recently re-examined the documents and was so impressed, members plan to make a posthumous apology to the author. They say she was ignored the first time around because of her sex. "She was treated scurvily. The only consolation is that if she had become a scientist she may never have written her books," said Dr. John Marsden, executive secretary of the Linnean Society. The author, whose books still sell by the millions, died in 1943 at age 77. ___________________________________________________________________ Somebody read it in the New York Post, so I know it's true: 2/24/97