Trying Leviathan
Subtitle: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: October 22, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9780691129501
Subjects: Financial, taxation, commercial, industrial law; Jurisprudence & General Issues; c 1800 to c 1900; History Of Science; U.S. History - Late 19th Century (1877-1900); History - U.S.; History: American; USA; History; Life Sciences - Zoology - General; United States - State & Local - Middle Atlantic; American History; American Language and Literature; History of Science and Medicine, Philosophy of Science; 19th century; Classification; Law and legislation; New York; New York (State); Taxation; Trials (Tax evasion); Whale oil; Whales
Description: 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. - Publisher.