by D. Graham Burnett
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Product Description
In Moby-Dick, Ishmael declares, "Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that a whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me." Few readers today know just how much argument Ishmael is waiving aside. In fact, Melville's antihero here takes sides in one of the great controversies of the early nineteenth century--one that ultimately had to be resolved in the courts of New York City. In Trying Leviathan, D. Graham Burnett recovers the strange story of Maurice v. Judd, an 1818 trial that pitted the new sciences of taxonomy against the then-popular--and biblically sanctioned--view that the whale was a fish. The immediate dispute was mundane: whether whale oil was fish oil and therefore subject to state inspection. But the trial fueled a sensational public debate in which nothing less than the order of nature--and how we know it--was at stake. Burnett vividly re-creates the trial, during which a parade of experts--pea-coated whalemen, pompous philosophers, Jacobin lawyers--took the witness stand, brandishing books, drawings, and anatomical reports, and telling tall tales from whaling voyages. Falling in the middle of the century between Linnaeus and Darwin, the trial dramatized a revolutionary period that saw radical transformations in the understanding of the natural world. Out went comfortable biblical categories, and in came new sorting methods based on the minutiae of interior anatomy--and louche details about the sexual behaviors of God's creatures. When leviathan breached in New York in 1818, this strange beast churned both the natural and social orders--and not everyone would survive.
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Average Customer Review:
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
 A Whale of a Tale (sorry, couldn't resist the pun), 2007-12-29
Graham Burnett has taken an obscure 19th century court case (Maurice v. Judd) and evaluated the case in an unusual light - not on the technical merits of the case but on something much more expansive.
The premise of the case was that a merchant in 19th century New York, Samuel Judd, was fined by the fish oil inspector (Maurice) for having 3 kegs of uninspected whale oil. Judd proclaimed that the oil was not subject to inspection under the law because it was from a whale, not a fish. The technical merits of the case were simply to determine whether or not the whale oil was subject to the law and thus obliged to be inspected. Burnett, however, has evaluated scientific knowledge in the 19th century to determine whether or not the law was created in conformance with contemporary understandings of whether or not a whale was a fish or not.
Starting with biblical interpretations, and proceeding through the understandings of "common" New Yorkers, evaluations of natural historians, and seamen, Burnett demonstrates that this case did indeed demonstrate that the standard understanding in 19th century New York was, despite some views to the contrary, that a whale was indeed a fish.
The book is well written and quite enjoyable. The only reason I gave the book 4 stars instead of 5 is because of the epilogue/conclusion - I felt that they did not flow nearly as well with the standard subject matter as the rest of the book. I consider this to be more of a scientific history crossed with an intellectual history of a group of people - a fascinating approach and quite a diversion from the standard histories of the period.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
 Putting The Whale in Its Place, 2007-12-25
Just as schoolchildren now so easily learn that the Earth goes around the Sun, they easily learn that whales are not fish but air-breathing mammals. So it all seems so obvious, except that everything that lived in the sea was for millennia obviously a fish, and it took a while for us to get the classification right. When we did get it right, let's say starting with the 1758 classification system published by Carl Linnaeus, we didn't all get it right immediately, and it took a while for our education system to catch up. It also took a while for our legal system to do so. In _Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature_ (Princeton University Press), historian D. Graham Burnett has brought back a legal battle that some might regard as fully worthy of being forgotten. After all, it had to do with the classification of whale oil, an important article of trade at the time of the 1818 trial, but not at all part of our world today. Nonetheless, the trial at the time was a sensation which interested New Yorkers not just over financial issues. It was a confrontation over natural history between the type of folk taxonomy people found in the Bible and the then-controversial scientific classification proposed by biologists. Although Burnett is not writing for the purpose of comparison with current events, readers will be reminded of the current clashes between Biblical literalists and scientific instruction; and if you regard scientists as the good guys, in this case, the good guys didn't win.
Whales were extraordinary creatures, to be sure, but for most people, even whalemen, they remained fish. Burnett says "the Genesical division of animals into those that fly, those that swim, and those that creep was pervasive and tenacious." One of the lawyers in the trial covered in this book indeed said, "We shall rely on the sacred volume as conclusive." Scientific taxonomic systems were subject to change and rearrangement; this is, we know, one of the strengths of science, to change models when more data become available, but during the trial, lawyers were able to make such rearrangements seem arbitrary or capricious, while the Bible's taxonomy was eternal. The trial, _Maurice v. Judd_, was based on the question of whether whale oil was fish oil. There was a New York state inspector of fish oils, the plaintiff James Maurice, who was quite interested in inspecting (and being paid for inspecting) barrels of whale oil, and Samuel Judd who dealt in spermaceti oil who did not want to pay for such testing. The star witness, physician and professor of natural history Samuel Latham Mitchill. When he declared, "As a man of science, I can say positively, that a whale is no more a fish than a man," he was calling upon ideas that would be more fully examined thirty years later with the publication of _On the Origin of Species_, and hinting that there was no sacred gap between animals and humans. Lawyers who cross-examined him challenged the elevation of whales to some sort of kinship with humans. Since this was a time when New York was considering extending citizenship to former slaves, Mitchill was twitted with the question of whether biologically an "orang outang" was close enough to us to be considered a freeman and given the vote. Poor Mitchill, who was deeply interested in advancing science and making New York a center for scientific thought, became a laughingstock, a target of satires in poetry reprinted by one newspaper after another long after the trial was over.
The jury deliberated for all of a quarter hour before announcing a verdict for Maurice, the inspector of fish oils. In the eyes of the court, the whale counted as a fish, but the New York legislature within a month deliberately exempted whale oil from inspection. Thus ended the matter under consideration for the trial, which played its role in the eventual acceptance of scientific taxonomy. _Trying Leviathan_, though, is about far more than just how the trial turned out or whether whales are fish. Definitions regarding an altogether scientific issue had to jostle with popular belief and democracy as well as economic interests. Burnett reminds us in a volume that shows admirably broad research and clear writing that this sort of trial drama, "the one that pitches society against science (or vice versa)", is a drama that always draws a crowd, "from Galileo's travails to those of Lysenko, from Scopes to intelligent design." It is one way that the order of nature gets encompassed into the order of popular and legal thought.
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