TWO    Common Sense

MANHATTAN AND ITS WHALES

Several comments in the transcripts of Maurice v. Judd make it clear that the galleries of the Mayor’s Court were very crowded on the last days of the year in 1818. In his closing arguments, for instance, Sampson declared that “it needed no handbills to collect the crowd that has filled this court during the whole trial.” The simple rumor of such a “paradox,” to be debated by several of the most learned men of the city, “was enough, if the living had no curiosity, to bring the dead out of their graves.” That same “paradox” guaranteed the coverage of the trial in a host of newspapers and periodicals in New York and beyond—eventually across much of the young Republic.1

The paradox in question was simply the proposition that a whale was not a fish. What could be more preposterous? As Anthon explained to the jury: “according to the common understanding and acceptation of men, it would seem that this could hardly admit of a question.” And yet, “it has … remained for the great lights of the present age to draw it into serious, grave discussion, and to exclude the whale from the family of fish.”² Nor was this sense of surprise merely the theatrical special pleading of the plaintiff’s counsel, who clearly had an interest in presenting his opponent’s position as an egregious departure from habit, custom, and verity: published and unpublished responses to the trial support Anthon’s assertion that the vast majority of Americans not only assumed that a whale was a fish, but were surprised to learn that the question could be debated. The National Advocate, reporting on the “very long and sage trial” on the morning of the first of January of 1819, informed readers that what had emerged from the case was the discovery that learned opinion appeared, on balance, to maintain that whales were not fish. The editors had this to say in response: “this is stretching a point of learning to a dangerous length, and all the minute distinctions of genera in the science of ichthiology [sic], will not prevent a man of common sense from believing that a whale is a fish.”³

Still more revealing on public opinion is a private letter authored by Henry Meigs—the scion of a distinguished New York political family (and himself a competent amateur naturalist) who was shortly to be elected to represent the second congressional district in the sixteenth Congress. Meigs had followed the trial closely, and writing to his father, a judge in Washington, DC, on the 2nd of January, 1819, Meigs reported on the uproar that attended this sensational case, explaining that Mitchill had testified in court “that a whale is no fish”:

Common sense is quite angry with the Doctor for thrusting his distinctions of mammalia &c down their throats. They don’t care a pin whether his blood be cold or hot; mammalia or Magnolia he swims & lives in the sea and they swear he is a fish.4

That Mitchill’s controversial position could be called a “paradox” (literally, against the doxa, the “teaching”) helpfully reminds us that there was indeed a doxa on the question, a teaching among Mitchill’s contemporaries that established the taxonomic status of the whale. Meigs hinted at this vernacular taxonomy when he characterized the logic of his fellow New Yorkers for his father: everyone knew that the whale “swims & lives in the sea,” hence, among the hoi polloi, the whale was a fish, QED. Meigs left out a key part of the syllogism, but that was because he could safely assume his father understood the ordinary English usage of the day. We modern readers may need a reminder: in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the word “fish” meant (as the 1817 Philadelphia edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language stated clearly) “an animal existing only in water.”⁵ At the trial, Anthon would invoke this very reasoning, announcing to the jury that, putting aside the various anatomical and physiological eccentricities of the cetes, “the whale remains a fish until naturalists can show him existing on dry land.”⁶ And the author of the article in the National Advocate made the tacit taxonomy on which this classification rested still more explicit: “a whale is a fish, for the simple reason that it is not a beast or a bird.”7

This last aside demands closer scrutiny, since it valuably hints at the principled (and, indeed, authoritative) conception of the “order of nature” that informed popular opinion on the taxonomy of whales. The issue was not that no one understood, for instance, that whales gave birth to live young, or breathed air. In fact, Anthon confessed all such details, and during the course of the trial several of the witnesses—individuals without any scientific training—reflected an awareness of exactly these characteristics. It was rather that such differentia were seen to be secondary or tertiary considerations, and not relevant to establishing where whales belonged in the primary threefold division of animate creation, the division that sorted all creatures into “fish,” “beasts,” and “birds”—i.e., those that swam in the deep, those that crept on the land, and those that flew in the sky.

The authority for this tripartite taxonomy was nothing less than the first chapter of Genesis, where two verses relevant to the creation, 26 and 28, organized non-human creatures according to the elemental categories of water, earth, and air. In Genesis 1:26, after making man in His image, God gives to humanity its inheritance, declaring: “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” And in Genesis 1:28 the same subdivisions are reinforced: “have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Citing these verses, Anthon explicitly set ordinary language (the language that, for instance, made a fish-monger of the peddler of “oysters, crabs, and clams”⁸) and scriptural tradition against the “visionary theories of modern times”: “[W]e shall rely on the sacred volume as conclusive,” he declared. “From it we learn the great division of all created things, fixed by the deity himself, and which naturalists may mar, but cannot mend, is, the birds of the air, the beasts of the field, and the fish of the sea.”⁹

Moreover, by these lights, the whale was not just any fish. Rather, it was, as the Philadelphia Lady’s and Gentleman’s Weekly Literary Museum and Musical Magazine commented in its article on the trial, the very “king of the scaly tribe,” the primogenitus of the seas.¹⁰ A survey of juvenile literature and didactic volumes touching on natural history available in New York before 1819 not only confirms that whales were regularly included among the fish, but also demonstrates that they were (on the strength of scripture) frequently enshrined as the crowning creature of that class.11 Telling in this instance is the pamphlet entitled The History of Fish, published by Samuel Wood and Sons in New York City circa 1816, and available at the “Juvenile Book-Store” on Pearl Street, just a few blocks north of the Mayor’s Court. The frontispiece of this work [Figure 1] depicts, under the title, a wood engraving of a spouting whalecreature, and another quotation from Genesis (chapter 1, verse 21) that would do its duty in Maurice v. Judd: “And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth.” The very first chapter of The History of Fish consisted of an essay on whales (longer than any other chapter in the book), which detailed their great size and strength, discussed the commercial products to be derived from them—oil and whalebone—and recalled the eighteenth-century shore-based enterprise in South and East Hampton on Long Island that used to pursue them in local waters.¹² In addition, the text mentioned a near encounter for New York City itself: “In the year 1775 or 76, came into the sound about twenty miles from New York, two whales, an old and a young one; the latter was caught, and taken on shore at Mamaroneck; it was about eighteen or twenty feet in length.”¹³ Other juvenile texts available in the same period also placed the whales at the head of their catalogs of “wonderful fishes,” and scholars of biblical natural history (a minor genre in the period, generally consisting of essays on the plants and animals mentioned in the Bible—ideally suited to pious schoolroom instruction) certainly affirmed this view.¹⁴ Indeed, most Americans probably first encountered the whale in the context of nursery-rhyme natural theology: the ubiquitous New England Primer reserved the letter “W” as an occasion to catechize Christian youths in the pervasive power of the Lord’s call, using a couplet that would have been quick to the tongue of every New Yorker in 1818, “Whales in the sea / God’s voice obey.”¹⁵

FIGURE 1. The King of the Sea: the spouting fish, as depicted on the title page of a book for sale around the corner from the Mayor’s Court. Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

The reference to whales at Mamaroneck (i.e., in New York waters) raises the question of what contact the citizens of New York might have had with the “cetes,” other than through their candles (the well-to-do could afford clean-burning white spermaceti candles, made from a sweet-smelling oily wax collected from the head cavity and body fat of sperm whales), umbrella ribs, and corsets (both fashioned from strips of “whalebone,” the elastic strips of baleen taken from the mouth of right and bowhead whales). There was by this time no longer any whaling out of the city’s ports, and only a handful of vessels, sailing irregularly, still worked from the other shipping centers up the Hudson. While Sag Harbor continued to be an active whaling harbor, it was dwarfed in scale by Nantucket and New Bedford, and the eastern tip of Long Island was anyway a long way from Manhattan.16 Strandings in New Jersey or Long Island were uncommon enough to merit mentions in the New York City papers when they occurred, particularly when there was a chance to get a good view. In 1814 a 22-foot cetacean of some sort blundered up the Delaware River and was briefly exhibited near Trenton, but that would have been beyond the reach of the citizens of New York (at least those not interested in a tiresome day-trip).17 This creature never made the post-mortem journey to Manhattan, but a decade earlier, in the spring of 1804, a still larger whale, taken in the same river and shown at the wharves in Philadelphia, had actually been towed up to New York City by a scrappy entrepreneur and exhibited “from sunrise to 7 o’clock PM” at one of the slips in the East River.¹⁸ Despite being some thirty feet long the carcass did not, in the end, attract the enthusiastic attentions of the populace, largely because by the time it came to be moored (at Ackerly’s wharf, not far from Wall Street) it was more than a month old, having already been exhibited for several weeks at Philadelphia. The proprietor’s defensive advertisements in the New York papers—denying the “report prevailing” that his curiosity was “offensive,” and insisting that the only smell was that which “naturally arises from the Blubber”—make clear that the beast was in a sorry state as the weather warmed up; New Yorkers evidently worked harder to stay away than to visit.¹⁹ As we shall see, Maurice v. Judd itself hugely stimulated interest in whales and their anatomy in the city after December of 1818, but what about before that? Was there any place in the city that a curious New Yorker could see a whale?

The answer is yes. As of August, 1818, there were in fact two good-sized bits of whale skeleton in the city, and both of them were to be found in the grand new civic emporium of learned culture, the “New-York Institution of Learned and Scientific Establishments” [Plate 1], located on Chambers Street on the north side of City Hall Park, about thirty yards from the Mayor’s Court itself (which was held inside City Hall) [Plate 2]. Since I will suggest, in the end, that urban geography matters in the story of Maurice v. Judd, it may be worth taking a moment now to look at the period map of lower Manhattan [Plate 3] and the detail of City Hall Park [Plate 4] to see how these buildings were situated, and to get a sense of what the civic heart of the city looked like in those days.

The brainchild of the Princeton-educated (and sometimes bankrupt) merchant, Masonic muckety-muck, and Tammany sagamore, John Pintard, and brought into being by the controversial mayor (and failed presidential candidate) DeWitt Clinton, the New-York Institution emerged in 1816 out of the lobbying of a group of “gentlemen of taste & literature” preoccupied with the city’s unhappy reputation as an exclusively mercantile (perhaps even mercenary) center of getting and spending, a place without (in contrast to Boston and Philadelphia) much regard for arts, letters, or science.20 As the Common Council of the city put it in that year, “The Citizens of New York have too long been stigmatized as phlegmatic, money making & plodding—Our Sister Cities deny we possess any taste for the sciences.”²¹ The completion of a new almshouse at Bellevue, and the changing physical and social setting of City Hall Park (which now featured the City’s architectural pride, Joseph Francois Mangin and John McComb Jr.’s new City Hall building), had left the “Old Almshouse” at the top of the park vacant, and it was this structure that DeWitt Clinton secured as the free home for a handful of New York’s learned societies and institutions: his administration would display its commitment to a high-minded patronage of learning by means of actual bricks and mortar, and City Hall Park would become an august citadel of knowledge and power, with Mangin and McComb’s white marble wedding cake flanked by a broad palace of arts, letters, and science.²² Though satirists jeered the parade of worthies establishing themselves in the halls once thronged with ragpickers and orphans, the lure of civic subsidies nevertheless prompted a run on the rent-free space, and behind-the-scenes jockeying determined the small pool of lucky leaseholders, which included, when the dust settled by the summer of 1817: the New-York Historical Society, the American Academy of Fine Arts, the Literary and Philosophical Society, the New-York Society Library, John Griscom’s Chemistry Laboratory, and the Lyceum of Natural History; John Scudder’s “American Museum” would be added to the roster shortly thereafter.²³

This consolidation of New York’s coterie of older learned societies (which had much overlap in their membership rolls), together with a new nascent quasi-professional society for naturalists (the Lyceum), a performing chemist-apothecary dedicated to public instruction (Griscom), and a commercial enterprise for the edification and entertainment of the people (Scudder’s Museum), all within a stone’s throw of the city’s political and legal nucleus, represents a significant shift in the character, visibility, and cultural authority of science in New York in this period. DeWitt Clinton, thinking in terms of posterity, invoked England’s Royal Society itself, and by the 2nd of November of 1818, David Hosack (the London- and Edinburgh-educated botanist, who had studied with James E. Smith, the president of the Linnaean Society of London, and who had established the Elgin Botanical Garden in New York City upon his return, taking over Mitchill’s professorship at Columbia College) could announce that, thanks to the “liberal Corporation,” the New-York Institution had helped elevate the city of New York’s literary, medical, and scientific character “to that rank which in other respects she has long enjoyed.”24

For Hosack, moreover, the availability of natural history specimens was a key feature of New York’s intellectual maturity:

In the Cabinet of Natural History belonging to this College [the College of Physicians and Surgeons], in connexion with those attached to the New-York Historical Society and Lyceum of Natural History, and the valuable collection that has been amassed by that indefatigable and skilful collector and preserver of the productions of nature, the proprietor of the New-York Museum, <* Mr. John Scudder> the student is presented, under the guidance of Dr. Mitchill, our learned professor of Natural History, with a view of the most important objects that can arrest your attention in any of the branches of that useful science.²⁵ Two of those collections featured partial whale skeletons: the cabinet of the Lyceum of Natural History (which owned the skull and jaw of a large right whale), and Scudder’s Museum (which held the jaw from another large baleen whale, almost certainly also from a right). These were very different institutions, and very different collections. In a sense, we might say that one of these whale specimens belonged to “those who philosophize,” and the other belonged to “everyone else.”

The first and more complete set of bones was part of the private cabinet of the newest and most dynamic society for the study of nature in New York City, the Lyceum of Natural History, which received for its collection on Monday, the 9th of June, 1817, “the head and jaws of a whale, balena mysteicetus … from Mr Martin Van Buren of Flatbush.”26 The Lyceum, founded in early 1817, represented an upstart private society of dedicated naturalists, who had come together in the hopes of emulating Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences.²⁷ Just as this latter institution had formed itself as an alternative to what many of its members saw as the fusty collective of patrician generalists that dominated Philadelphia’s learned culture (the American Philosophical Society), so, too, the animating spirits behind the Lyceum were taken with the idea of a society for natural science more focused than either the Literary and Philosophical Society or the Historical Society, both of which still worked to represent all the relevant branches of polite learning, from numismatics to malacology, mathematics to philology, theater to meteorology. By contrast, the members of the new Lyceum were expected to aspire to mastery in some domain of the specifically natural sciences: the bar for membership would be set to reflect these higher expectations, and all members would be called on to present papers in their areas of expertise, with the hope that these papers would yield publishable contributions in natural history (taken to include zoology, botany, geology, and a number of related sciences of the earth, sea, and atmosphere).28 The Lyceum had a small but fast-growing cabinet of natural history specimens, and the records of the early society make clear that the maintenance and expansion of the cabinet were major preoccupations of the members. Within a decade the Lyceum would have amassed the most extensive private teaching collection in the city, buying out all the naturalia in the cabinet of the Historical Society (which was increasingly focused on antiquities) and arguably holding the best collection of fish and reptiles in the country.²⁹ While most of the original collection (including the whale) was destroyed in a fire in 1866, the Lyceum’s renewed holdings would go on to form the seed objects in what is now known as the American Museum of Natural History.

In the next chapter, which will take up the status of the whale among “those who philosophize,” I will return to the Lyceum, its teaching cabinet, and its whale skeleton. For now we need to focus on the bits of cetacean that could be seen by anyone in possession of a quarter (the equivalent today of, say, a movie ticket) and the inclination to visit the public face of the city’s new Institution of Learned and Scientific Establishments.³⁰

In contrast to the private society cabinet of the Lyceum, Scudder’s American Museum, which took up the galleries on the western end of the Old Almshouse building [Figure 2], was New York’s version of the Philadelphia and Baltimore institutions made famous by the Peale family.³¹ Vanguard establishments in what Joel Orosz has called the American “didactic enlightenment” of the period 1800–1820, these public collections occupied an unstable cultural niche somewhere between (on the one hand) the pedagogical ideal of enlightening improvement for all worthy citizens of the Republic, and (on the other) the commercial imperatives of mass entertainment. The trajectory of the objects in the Scudder collection nicely traces the arc between these poles, since the cabinet started out as the museum of the philanthropic Tammany Society in the 1790s, and by the 1840s the collection had been swept under the flamboyant and expanding reach of the “Prince of Humbugs,” P.T. Barnum. The years during which the collection resided in the New-York Institution, 1817–1830 (and particularly the early years, before the death of the animating spirit of the collection, John Scudder Sr., in 1821), saw the American Museum’s most successful marriage of public instruction and commercial viability.

FIGURE 2. Scudder’s American Museum: a view of the northwest corner of City Hall Park, looking southeast; Scudder’s establishment had signage on the western end of the New-York Institution (City Hall itself is the building on the right). Courtesy of the Picture Collection of the Branch Libraries, New York Public Library; Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

Scudder had learned the trade of managing such an enterprise from the painter-cum-historian-cum-showman Edward Savage, whose “City Museum” at 80 Greenwich Street represented merely the last in a string of short-lived panoramas and galleries from Boston to Philadelphia in which Savage had been involved from 1794 to 1809, when he sold out to Scudder, his most able apprentice. The new proprietor, who had always displayed a marked preference for natural history over the beaux-arts taste of his boss, had by that point built up a small collection of his own during a hiatus in his employment for Savage, and thus by March of 1810 when Scudder opened his “New American Museum” at 21 Chatham Street (just to the east of City Hall Park) he had already begun to beef up Savage’s core collection of naval battle tableaux and unusual sculpture with a set of natural historical objects.

The whale jaw was perhaps his greatest commercial success of all. Hacked from an animal taken on Long Island’s South Shore in the spring of 1814, and transported by coasting vessel and cart to a choice spot on Broadway just above City Hall Park, this massive archway of bone and flesh weighed nearly 4,000 pounds, and a dozen men could stand beneath its six-foot curtains of baleen. It arrived on the 25th of March, and the newspapers were instantly plastered with advertisements exhorting curious New Yorkers to “seize the present opportunity” and avail themselves (for the rock-bottom fee of twenty-five cents) of the chance to see “the jaw of this mammoth of the deep,” a wonder “beautiful beyond description.”32 By the next week a festival atmosphere prevailed, and Scudder, never afraid to gild the lily, had engaged his favorite band—a group of (purported) Italians known as “The Pandean Minstrels” (who often jazzed-up special events at the museum)—to perform evening concerts under the whale jaw. Who could resist the “delightful melody on their Reed Pipes, such as were used in antient [sic] times by Pan, the son of Mercury and God of Shepherds, in the fields of Arcadia”—particularly when these bacchantic strains echoed under the arches of the Leviathan? As one advertisement for the event proclaimed: “Perhaps a scene so natural, so beautiful, so musical and new in its appearance was never before seen, heard of, or even thought of, in the old or new world.”³³ Fair enough.³⁴

Scudder packed them in on Broadway: by the 4th of April the papers were declaring the whale jaw the most extraordinary thing to happen in the city since the Revolution.35 And Scudder milked it for all it was worth: nearly a month later he was still flogging the jaw (which was about to go on the road, for displays in Albany and points farther upstate), though his promise to potential customers—that “owing to the attention it has received from the proprietor, it is perfectly as sweet and destitute of the least disagreeable smell as the day on which it arrived”—suggests his bandstand was getting a little gray around the proverbial gills (proverbial gills) by late April.³⁶ By the end of the summer the jaw—now stripped down to bone and baleen and cleaned up—was back in the city, and (still touted as “the greatest curiosity ever offered to the public”) installed in the American Museum on Chatham Street.

Such carnival promotions were the heart of the business, but during these early years of the American Museum Scudder also sought out connections among the more visible naturalists in the city—including Samuel L. Mitchill himself—and made the holdings in his public gallery available as a teaching collection, positioning his emporium on the cusp of university culture. An anonymous author (Scudder himself?), writing in the Commercial Advertiser shortly after the opening of the collection, emphasized the value of the specimens for public instruction in natural history: “The selection, preservation and arrangement of the various subjects of Natural History, do infinite credit to the taste, skill and judgement of Mr Scudder…. Parents will find this Museum an instructive school to teach their Children to behold and admire the marvelous works of creation.”³⁷ It would seem that Mitchill agreed, since by 1811 he was using the collection to supplement his teaching at the breakaway institution of higher education that would soon be named the College of Physicians and Surgeons. A student who had attended a cycle of Mitchill’s lectures in natural history wrote an abstract of the course for the American Medical and Philosophical Register in that year, and noted:

While he [Mitchill] was occupied in tracing the generic and specific characters of animals, he made adjournments day after day, from the college to the museum of Mr. Scudder, and there, in the midst of animal specimens prepared by that indefatigable collector, with the most exquisite touches of art, he gave practical lessons on the several classes of creatures, to an audience that entered fully into the spirit of the business.38

The famous whale jaw itself had drawn Mitchill’s attention the moment it landed on the docks: A young Philadelphia Quaker with an interest in natural history, Reuben Haines, visited New York several times in the early teens, and, via a network of Quaker grandees, made Mitchill’s personal acquaintance. In addition to attending Hosack’s botany lectures at the Elgin Botanical Gardens, and sitting in on Mitchill’s introduction to natural history at the new college, Haines had the honor of some personal tuition in marine natural history with Mitchill himself, peripatetic instruction that involved visits to Mitchill’s preferred sites for natural history. As Haines wrote a Philadelphia friend on the 5th of April, 1814 (in the thick of the whale jaw craze on Broadway):

But above all I have had the honour of standing in the Jaw of the Great Whale (Balaena Mysticetus) with the learned Dr. Sam^l L Mitchell [sic]—besides receiving a private lecture from him in the New York Fish market …³⁹

In 1816, by dint of his strong allies and reputation as a civic-minded entrepreneur, Scudder succeeded in securing the largest space in the new New-York Institution (a room of 96 by 41 feet, with a ceiling high enough to admit a gallery, and glass cases running the length of the walls), and by the 2nd of July, 1817 he had moved the collection over from neighboring Chatham Street, and was ready for a gala opening for his patrons and “those scientific gentlemen who had taken a particular interest in his success”—a private thank you party to be followed by a public vernissage.⁴⁰ An anonymous letter (again, quite possibly a plant) to the editors of the first volume of the American Monthly Magazine and Critical Review had nothing but praise for this new beacon in the city’s cultural landscape:

The brilliant display made on this occasion, gave an opportunity for many to admire the taste of Mr. Scudder (the proprietor) in the disposition of his natural curiosities, and the elegant manner in which he has prepared and preserved them, and varied their natural attitudes to give the strongest impressions, and produce the most lasting effect upon the beholder…. It was the opinion of several gentlemen present [at] the first exhibition, that neither London nor Paris, which they had visited, possessed specimens in such high state of preservation; and that as he already excelled in the preparation, he would soon exceed in the number of his Museum, any similar establishment.41

By October of that year Scudder had pressed forward with a contribution to the broad pedagogical program of the New-York Institution. Responding to the concern that the majority of the lectures given at the Institution were presented within the meetings of the various learned societies themselves, and thus “heard only by the scientific gentlemen who compose these societies,” Scudder announced that for the “gratification of our citizens” and pursuant to the aim of his museum—“combining amusement with instruction”—he would engage a “professional gentleman to deliver a course of Lectures on Natural History, in the Museum,” two or three times a week through the academic season (beginning in October). These lectures—to be held in the upstairs rooms of the American Museum, which would be “fitted up for the accommodation of attendants”—would “embrace a general view of the animal creation, and the specimens in the Museum will be used in illustration of the subjects under discussion.”⁴²

This public instruction was wholly consistent with John Pintard’s founding vision for the New-York Institution. In a letter to his daughter about this brick and mortar “child of my old age” (as he called it) Pintard wrote, shortly before the opening, that he expected that the Institution would sponsor “courses of Lectures in Chemistry, Minerology, Zoology & Botany.”⁴³ Whether such a sequence of public lectures ever actually took place is not clear. What is certain, however, is that, even as he continued to hold the approbation of the city’s emerging scientific community, Scudder assiduously attended to his responsibilities as a purveyor of public entertainment. He engaged various musicians to play on the balcony of the Institution on pleasant evenings, and built a reputation for the museum as a focal point for civic pageantry, decorating the establishment with emblazoned patriotic dioramas on special occasions like the 4th of July, and advertising in the newspapers in the holiday season that “The Museum will be Brilliantly Illuminated on Christmas and New Year’s evenings, and the Museum Band will perform some of the most appropriate and pleasing airs.”44 These same circulars did not belabor the museum’s holdings in natural history, but did draw attention to the “Grand Cosmorama” of Vesuvius and Naples, as well as an excellent marble likeness of sleeping Cupid, “executed by a grand master in Italy.”

Pintard himself was pressed to acknowledge the tension between the American Museum’s growing popular appeal as a destination for promenades, rendezvous, and civic mingling, and its purported goal of public instruction. After visiting Scudder’s on the 4th of July in 1819, he wrote to his daughter that “His museum was thronged”:

But what to me was the most imposing spectacle, was the multitude Males & Females who thronged and filled all the park between his porch and Broadway. The moon, nearly at full, shone resplendent & the blaze of the light from the illumination [i.e., Scudder’s brightly lit façade] thrown on several thousand faces, all, as in a theatre, looking towards the Museum, presented a most interesting sight. As to the interior, the multitude came to see the 4th of July, for the crowd was so great, & the heat so insufferable, that no gratification could arise from viewing his elegant preparations.⁴⁵

The music, however, was “very fine.”

Charles Willson Peale, no stranger to the delicate matter of holding public entertainment together with moral and natural philosophy, visited Scudder’s Museum shortly before it opened, both to scope out a rival, and as part of a mooted Peale-Scudder joint enterprise (which Pintard had tried to broker). While Peale appreciated the collection, he did note in his diary that a number of the animals had, to his eye, been mounted for sensational display rather than for scientific instruction: they had been configured to “excite [the] admiration of those unacquainted with proper attitudes” of such beasts, and a surfeit of shellac and paintbox colors made for “beauty of plumage and slickness of skins,” but not necessarily accuracy of form or appearance.⁴⁶ There was a bit too much nudity in the print room, too, for Peale’s Philadelphia taste.

Because I am interested in recovering the vernacular natural history reflected in Scudder’s Museum, and intend to use his inventory and arrangement for clues to what museum-goers in New York in 1818 would have learned about the order of nature (in general) and the place of whales in that order (in particular), we need to consider for a moment just who went to the American Museum. Was it a place of resort for “everyone”? Can it offer us insight into the understanding of “ordinary citizens” like those on the jury of Maurice v. Judd?

By far the most detailed effort to examine the social profile of the visitors to American public cabinets in this period is David Brigham’s essay on “Social Class and Participation in Peale’s Philadelphia Museum,” which makes use of extensive subscription rosters to sketch the composition of the most dedicated patrons of that collection. Extending those observations to Scudder’s Museum is by no means without its pitfalls, but in lieu of equivalent records there is little alternative. In sum, then, Brigham shows that “in contemporary terms, the upper sort were vastly overrepresented among Peale’s subscribers, while the middling sort were underrepresented and the lower sort were absent.”47 This is to say that the majority of those who bought full-year passes for admission hailed from the “high non-manual” occupations (successful merchants, doctors and attorneys, appointed officials of government), though “low non-manual” occupations (like shopkeepers, clerks, and small manufacturers) were also well represented, and “high manual” tradesmen (like leather workers, bookbinders and printers, and apothecaries) amounted to more than ten percent of the total group. This breakdown represents subscribers, that is, those making a significant commitment to the museum (by 1819, a subscription cost $10), so it is safe to assume that a similar survey of ordinary day-ticket admissions would reflect a considerably broader segment of the population. At the same time, the exclusion of the “lower sort” did represent an explicit aim of the establishment, which traded on aspirations of moral improvement and social grace. The cost of an ordinary admission ticket was low, but Peale wrote in 1824 that “the doors of the Museum have ever been closed against the profligate and the indecent, [and] it has been preserved as a place where the virtuous and refined of society could meet to enjoy such pleasures as can be tasted by the virtuous and refined alone.”⁴⁸ Such declarations were perhaps more optative than descriptive, particularly in light of Peale’s perpetual struggles to maintain the gracious appointments of his public parlor: by 1809 he was obliged to install signage requesting that visitors refrain from plinking at the displays, and in the same year he complained to his son that people not only smudged the glass of the cases and sometimes stood on the leather-covered benches to peer into the higher shelves, but that some even went so far as to scrawl graffiti on the plaster casts, and scratch their names into the bases of the natural history specimens.49 The sparser evidence on the character of Scudder’s establishment suggests a similar institution, one that reached a similar community. It was a place that would certainly have been within the cultural horizon of the more or less reputable citizens selected for the jury in Maurice v. Judd—men like the successful brewer William Wilmerding, the hardware dealer Isaac Underhill, the registered auctioneer and dry-goods merchant William S. Hick, or the demimonde lawyer George Niven.⁵⁰

What would they have learned about the natural world from such a visit? The best evidence for the contents and organization of the American Museum is to be found in a unique folio broadsheet printed in 1819 and surviving in the collection of the New-York Historical Society, entitled, “Abridged catalogue of the Principal Natural and Artificial Curiosities, now in the American Museum.” This inventory arranged the contents of the natural history collection by type, after the manner of a taxonomy, informing the prospective visitor that the museum held, for instance: “112 cases of birds, containing 676 from different parts of the globe,” including 44 hummingbirds; “46 cases of Quadrupeds, containing 113 animals,” including “2 leopard seals taken in a net opposite the city”; along with considerable holdings of “fish,” “reptiles,” and “insects.”⁵¹

The “quadruped” entry signals that Scudder organized his zoology according to traditional classifications, since the class of “four-footed beasts”—while retained, for instance, in the work of Buffon and his many students and pirates—had long been losing its standing as a meaningful grouping among classifiers who followed Linnaeus’s tenth edition of the Systema Naturae of 1758, and it had slipped quite completely out of formal taxonomy as the techniques of comparative anatomy gained ascendancy in the early years of the nineteenth century. That Scudder put a seal among the “quadrupeds” indicates that he was not unaware that actual four-footedness was no longer a prerequisite for this category. Seals, otters, and walruses had been numbered among the “amphibia” in many eighteenth-century taxonomies, and Scudder’s sense that they belonged with his goats and wolves reflected the way that the term “quadruped” had—in the suburbs of university learning, in the mid-Atlantic regions of the young Republic, by 1819—acquired something of the sense that advocates of the “new philosophy” gave to their preferred Linnaean term, “Mammalia.”

Turning to Scudder’s listing of fish, however, it becomes clear that he had by no means wholly reconfigured his groupings along these new lines. The first three listed “fish” were given as follows:

1) The whale killer, or great Black Fish of the South Seas, was taken off the Island of Nantucket, and when living weighed 18 cwt. Measures 7 feet in circumference and 12 in length.

2) Bottle nose porpoise of the South Seas, was taken in Long Island Sound, December, 1812.

3) The Herring Hog Porpoise of North America.

which Scudder would surely have known were all gill-less creatures that spouted.52 The lesser fish—like “dolphins” (meaning here Coryphaena hippurus [Linnaeus, 1758], now referred to most often as dorado, or mahi mahi) and extending even to squid—followed in the list. In addition, at the bottom of the section Scudder alludes to generous holdings of “crustaceous fish” including a large lobster, a South American “crawfish,” and “the great land crab from the Spanish Main.”

This configuration of “cetes” with crabs and the “sepia” nicely captures the ample signification of “fish” in the period: in the institution with the best claim to serve as the city’s popular temple for natural history instruction, “fish” meant, grossly, “creatures from the water.”

Not that it was quite that simple. Creatures from the water with four legs did not rank with the fish: turtles (including a monster 1,000-pound sea turtle taken by a New York pilot boat just outside of the entrance to the harbor), for instance, got a separate listing; they were not considered “quadrupeds” proper, but nor were they “fish” (or, for that matter, “reptiles,” a designation reserved for things that slithered on their bellies, like snakes).53

Still more telling, perhaps, where Maurice v. Judd is concerned, is how Scudder listed his vaunted whale jaw specimen: he placed this object—which had once been the talk of the town—not under the “fish” at all, but rather under the catchall heading of “Miscellaneous,” a category in which he lumped together both natural and artificial curiosities. Hence, together with the whale jaw we discover an “Indian Mummy, dug out of a saltpetre cave in Kentucky,” followed by the “teeth of a mammoth” and (less alluring, perhaps) a group of large hairballs, including three “taken out of the bowels of a hog owned by J. Deitz in Spring Street, wt. 10 lbs.”⁵⁴

A number of explanations might be offered for this seemingly odd grouping. Perhaps the incompleteness of the whale specimen (it was just a jaw after all) meant it did not belong in the fish listing; or perhaps the presence of the whalebone in the jaw made the specimen more salient as the raw material for familiar manufactured commodities than as a proper item of natural history (which might explain how the jaw could be placed beside a “miniature model of the palace of St. Cloud with 144 moving figures, built entirely from beef bones”). What is certain, however, is that this strange arrangement manifests the degree to which whales, in New York in the early nineteenth century, could still be understood as exceptional, indeed, even as “wonders”: they defied familiar categories in natural history, and were perhaps best treated as remarkable singularities, rather than as exemplifying any particular natural kind. As Sir John Falstaff said of the otter—invoking the clerical taxonomies that governed Friday meals—there were some creatures that were simply problematic: “she’s neither fish nor flesh; a man knows not where to have her.”55 Vast and anomalous, whales figured significantly as creatures that defied easy identification, and they eluded the clear and distinct grasp of the inquiring eye and mind: not for nothing had the expression “very like a whale” come to mean in familiar English, “I don’t know what you are talking about,” or, more pointedly, “I don’t believe you.”⁵⁶ By these lights, it was perhaps best to leave the great whales outside of natural history classification altogether.

If a close examination of Scudder’s Museum tells us anything about the status of whales in early nineteenth-century New York, it tells us that they were deeply unfamiliar creatures. This overarching fact presented the lawyers in Maurice v. Judd with a serious problem: the subject of this trial could not but be, in a very real way, a cipher. Anthon, pressing for the self-evident fish-ness of the whale, acknowledged that few in the room had ever had any direct experience of the creatures at issue, but he insisted that this must not lead the jurors to disqualify themselves as agents in the decision: “Many of us may not have seen a whale,” he conceded, but this was no reason to be “led astray by the learning of philosophers.” After all, the naturalists were willing to group the great whales with a set of other “non-fish” (as they would have it) that were much more familiar. Subjecting the naturalist’s category of the “cetes” to a clever reductio, Anthon attacked:

it is worthy of remark, that if the whale, by reason of his peculiarities, is to be removed from the finny tribe, the porpoise puts in an equal claim to this distinguished honor…. but the porpoise is an inhabitant of our own waters, we can judge his claim for ourselves; and as the porpoise is as much and no more a fish than a whale, in the acceptation of naturalists, we shall all have the demonstration of our own senses to keep us right on this great question.57

The plaintiff’s side in the case was thus willing to concede the “peculiarities” of the naturalists—to wit, that the whale “breathes the vital air through lungs, that he has warm blood, that the whale copulates more humano, that the female brings forth her young alive and nourishes them at her breasts,” and that “the tail is flat”—but they skillfully called into question, repeatedly and effectively during the course of the trial, whether dividing nature by such characters produced meaningful and reliable categories, categories that ought to displace the more familiar grouping according to the three “empires” of nature: “we stand forth,” protested Anthon to the jury, “the advocates of the ancient empire of the whale, which, although fearfully shaken by the efforts of the naturalists, we trust will be established by your verdict.”⁵⁸

It is important to emphasize that by invoking this tripartite taxonomy and girding it with scriptural authority, Anthon and Sampson were not resurrecting an atavistic position (as we will see, Mitchill himself elected to buttress the work of Cuvier and Lamarck with his own gloss on Genesis), or pedaling a know-nothing natural history. Again and again during the course of the trial close knowledge of the natural world was deployed as the solvent of the taxonomic boundaries erected by the “new philosophy.” For instance, the flatness of the tail, it could be shown, “was not quite peculiar to the whale, so as to distinguish it from the fish,” being shared not only by the familiarly fish-like porpoise, but also by the flounder, a fish by any reckoning. This bit of quibbling could be answered, of course, by means of a lengthy explanation—namely by arguing “that the tail was not transverse with respect to the body, but would be perpendicular like that of other fish, if the fish swam perpendicularly, as others did; but as these fish swam on their side, the tail was in the same position: if they were to swim on their edge, then the tail would appear perpendicular.”59 But such exchanges revealed that fine work was necessary to maintain these novel classifications, and opened the way to mocking asides like Sampson’s: “Is it known, sir, what the motive of that family is for following so odd a humor? It is, perhaps, out of pride to look like whales …?”⁶⁰ Along the way the “new philosophy” began to smell very much of the lamp. A lamp burning very fishy oil.

Other differentia of formal taxonomy could wilt when subjected to the testimony of ordinary folk. Did bearing live young constitute a categorical distinction? In a showy gesture that surely played well in the gallery of the Mayor’s Court, Sampson and Anthon plucked from the crowd a man dressed in a pea jacket who had been standing with “a number of persons in the garb of fishermen, whom curiosity had drawn into the court, to hear the subject of their occupation discussed by lawyers and doctors.” Swearing him as a witness on the spot (was he really a well-coached player in a bit of courtroom theater? this is quite possible), the plaintiff’s lawyers elicited from this seaman that it was a “fact within his own knowledge that the dog fish [meaning one of the various species of sand shark], brought forth its young alive; and that he had seen it pup in a boat.” And yet its tail was fish-like, and it was never known to come to the surface to breathe.⁶¹ Sampson, a master trial lawyer who had done his ichthyological homework, was able to adduce further that both eels and blennies were viviparous, and the former, like the whale, were scaleless.⁶² Apparently, then, detailed natural history revealed that several of the ostensibly distinguishing characteristics of the cetes (according to the “new philosophy”) did not, in fact, cleanly distinguish them from the fish.

These sallies at the categories of the naturalists left only delicate matters as the rationale for keeping whales out of the fish category: breasts and reproductive organs. When called to the stand, Dr. Mitchill would make much of these points, which were at the heart of the classification he had come to defend: male fish, he could show, had “no penis intrans” and, unlike the cetes, propagation among the fishes involved the casting of “the fecundating fluid” over ova deposited in a “nidus.”63 These bedroom details, raised to the level of “philosophy,” and set against the commonplace distinctions of the fish-market (and the sacred groupings of scripture), clearly struck many New Yorkers as grounds for a snicker: shortly after the trial, a satirical poem—there were to be a number of them—in the Evening Post invoked the city’s preeminent naturalist with a sly dig at his prurient engagement with taxonomy, hailing him as

Mitchell, who sung the amours of fishes …⁶⁴

This chapter has argued that most New Yorkers in 1818 thought of whales as fish, indeed, even as the kings of the “empire” of the sea, the Genesical estate of the fishes. Contemporary comments made concerning the trial itself certainly suggest that this was the most common position, but further evidence can be found in the school texts of the period, and in the implicit taxonomies of the public institutions that installed an appreciation for natural history in the city. While there was understood to be much that was strange and anomalous about these creatures, perhaps wondrous, conceivably even monstrous and outside the bounds of ordinary categories, and while they were remote from the experience of most citizens, all these features only made the idea that whales belonged in the same taxonomic category with human beings even harder to credit. Whales seemed to be fish, though they were admittedly odd; that they were kin to man proved very hard to swallow. And yet this, it would emerge, was the claim of “those who philosophize.”

 

¹ IWF, p. 66. Other clues include Anthon’s allusion to the “crowded audience,” p. 2; see also Bogardus on p. 54. I will take up the extent of press coverage of the trial in the conclusion, chapter 7.

² Ibid., p. 12.

³ National Advocate, 1 January 1819, p. 2; emphasis in original.

⁴ H. Meigs to J. Meigs, 2 January 1819, Meigs Papers, New-York Historical Society; emphasis in original.

⁵ “Fish. s. an animal existing only in water.” Joseph Hamilton, Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language in Miniature (Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1817). The definition in Johnson’s 1770 London edition is even more expansive: “An animal that inhabits the water.” Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London: Strahan, 1770).

⁶ IWF, p. 13. The term “cete” (from the Greek, ketos, via the Latin, cetus—both loosely used to refer to large sea creatures) is no longer used by biologists to refer to the living whales, dolphins, and porpoises, but, in keeping with early-nineteenth-century usage, I will use it in this book where modern readers would expect to find “cetacean” or “Cetacea.”

⁷ National Advocate, 1 January 1819, p. 2; emphasis in original.

⁸ IWF, p. 56.

⁹ Ibid., p. 13.

¹⁰ Lady’s and Gentleman’s Weekly Literary Museum and Musical Magazine 3, no. 18 (22 February 1819), p. 144.

¹¹ My aim in this brief section is to address the call made by Sally Gregory Kohlstedt in her History of Science Society’s distinguished lecture of 1989, where she pressed historians of science to delve more deeply into popular conceptions of science in America, particularly in the early nineteenth century: “we should inquire into the outlook on science taught to children…. we should know what texts, popular treatises, and scholarly monographs sold well, how they were written, and what they included” (Kohlstedt, “Parlors, Primers, and Public Schooling,” p. 425). Helpful in this respect is Peter Benes, “To the Curious: Bird and Animal Exhibitions in New England, 1716–1825,” in New England’s Creatures: 1400–1900, edited by Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University Press, 1995), pp. 147–163.

¹² “Whalebone” is the common term for the flexible strips of baleen removed from the mouths of the mysticete whales and used, in the nineteenth century, in a variety of consumer and industrial products that called for light, flexible, and elastic ribs or springs.

¹³ The History of Fish (New York: Samuel Wood and Sons, 1816), p. 4.

¹⁴ For other primers, see, for instance, A History of Wonderful Fishes and Monsters of the Ocean (Dublin: Graisberry and Campbell, 1816). Compare, however, William Mavor’s Catechism of Animated Nature, or, An Easy Introduction to the Animal Kingdom: For the Use of Schools and Families (New York: Samuel Wood and Sons, 1819), which is a question-and-answer format redaction of the 10th edition (1758) of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, and which makes the “cetes” the seventh order of Mammalia (it is noteworthy, though, that this text was published after the trial of Maurice v. Judd). For a relevant example of biblical natural history, see Thaddeus M. Harris, The Natural History of the Bible (Boston: I. Thomas and E. T. Andrews, 1793). Harris (who was familiar with Linnaeus) not only considered whales fish (p. 167), he appears to have designated the crocodile a “fish” as well.

¹⁵ On this tradition, see Charles F. Heartman, The New-England Primer Issued Prior to 1830 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1934). The alphabets were often illustrated, and little woodcut whales commonly accompanied the letter “W.” John W. Francis, for one, suspected that Mitchill had a hand in seeing to it that this whale couplet was increasingly replaced by the “equally sonorous lines,” “By Washington / Great deeds were done,” though there is little hint, other than a general patriotism, for why he might have troubled himself with this revision. See John W. Francis, Reminiscences of Samuel Latham Mitchill, M.D., LL.D. (New York: John F. Trow, 1859), p. 11.

¹⁶ One of the witnesses in the case asserted that “he never heard of a whale ship in Albany, nor had he known of more than three coming into New-York in 15 or 20 years” (IWF, p. 15). See also: Alexander Starbuck, History of the American Whale Fishery from Its Earliest Inception to the Year 1876 (Waltham, MA: Published by the Author, 1878); and Richard C. McKay, South Street: A Maritime History of New York (New York: Putnam, 1934).

¹⁷ There are mentions of the incident in the New York papers. For a discussion, see Harry B. Weiss, Whaling in New Jersey (Trenton: New Jersey Agricultural Society, 1974), pp. 105–110.

¹⁸ Utica Patriot, 14 May 1804, p. 3.

¹⁹ New-York Herald, 21 April 1804, p. 2.

²⁰ On the founding of the Institution see Bender, New York Intellect, pp. 62–64; Bender is here working primarily from the valuable and detailed dissertation by Nodyne (see Nodyne, “The Role of De Witt Clinton”).

²¹ See Bender, New York Intellect, p. 64, and Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 467. See also “On the Means of Education and the Scientific Institutions in New York,” Analectic Magazine 13 (1819), pp. 452–459, at p. 459: “From the above remarks it will be seen that New York possesses very many of the sources, which will give rise to public improvement in knowledge, and is rapidly acquiring more; and if the progress be continued in the same ratio, she may soon rank as high in the intellectual scale as she does in the commercial.”

²² For a discussion of changing ideals and experiences of urban space in Manhattan in these years, see Wyn Kelley, Melville’s City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), particularly chapter 1.

²³ Note that Bender cites an erroneous date for the Lyceum’s move (he gives 1820). The manuscript minute books of the Lyceum itself, now held by its surviving successor institution, the New York Academy of Sciences, confirm that the Lyceum took over space originally conferred to J. G. Swift’s U.S. Military and Philosophical Society by April of 1817 (the Lyceum’s first meeting in the new space was on the 21st of that month). It is a little more difficult to say for certain when the Lyceum’s collection of naturalia was installed in the new space, but a description of a Lyceum meeting in the Institution published in the Columbian on 28 July 1818 makes it clear that the participants had their collections to hand, so this establishes a terminus a quo for the cabinet.

²⁴ David Hosack, “Progress of Medical Science in New-York,” American Monthly Magazine and Critical Review 4 (1818), pp. 114–116.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 114. The asterisked text represents a footnote in the original.

²⁶ Minutes of Lyceum of Natural History, 9 June 1817, collection of the New York Academy of Sciences. A note on nomenclature: Readers familiar with the modern Latin binomial designations for mysticete whales may be confused that I have identified Van Buren’s specimen as a right whale (genus Eubalaena) when Mitchill and his colleagues have explicitly called it a Balaena mysticetus, which now refers exclusively to the bowhead. As I discuss below (chapter 4, footnote 95), the differentiation among the various members of what we now know as the family Balaenidae was not common before 1850. Since the Lyceum’s whale was secured well to the south of the known range for bowhead whales in modern times, there is every reason to think that the creature in question was what we would now call a Eubalaena glacialis (Müller, 1776), a North Atlantic right whale. The same goes for Scudder’s whale, which also got called a Balaena mysticetus at various times.

²⁷ On the Academy of Natural Sciences, see Simon Baatz, “Philadelphia Patronage: The Institutional Structure of Natural History in the New Republic, 1800–1833,” Journal of the Early American Republic 8, no. 2 (1988), pp. 111–138.

²⁸ There is a large literature on the Lyceum and its relationship to the other learned societies of the period. I base this paragraph on a reading of the first three decades of manuscript minute books for all three societies (the Lyceum, the Historical Society, and the Literary and Philosophical Society), as well as on the following secondary sources: Ralph S. Bates, Scientific Societies in the United States (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965); Nodyne, “The Founding of the Lyceum of Natural History”; Baatz, “Knowledge, Culture, and Science”; Hindle, “Learned Society in New York”; and Harris, “New York’s First Scientific Body.”

²⁹ See Herman L. Fairchild, History of the New York Academy of Sciences (New York: The Author, 1887), pp. 101–103.

³⁰ In 1818 twenty-five cents would buy a sermon pamphlet (for the spiritually inclined) or a satirical quarterly (for the irreverent); it was the cost of admission to many outdoor entertainments like fairs or musical performances. Half-price tickets were often available for children.

³¹ For a sense of the development of these institutions, and their changing profile 1786–1850, see William T. Alderson, ed., Mermaids, Mummies, and Mastodons: The Emergence of the American Museum (Washington, DC: Association of American Museums, 1992). Kohlstedt’s chapter, “Entrepreneurs and Intellectuals: Natural History in Early American Museums,” is particularly valuable. See also: Lillian B. Miller and David C. Ward, eds., New Perspectives on Charles Willson Peale (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press and the Smithsonian Institution, 1991); and Toby Appel, “Science, Popular Culture, and Profit: Peale’s Philadelphia Museum,” Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History 9 (1980), pp. 619–634.

³² Evening Post, 26 March 1814, p. 3.

³³ This and above quotes from Evening Post, 2 April 1814, p. 3.

³⁴ Though it should be said that the Old World knew plenty about impromptu festivals on the occasion of a whale stranding. For instance, a host of Dutch prints dating back to the sixteenth century (many of them departing from an original drawing by Hendrik Goltzius) depict carnival gatherings of curious gawkers perusing a cetacean on the strand. There were similar traditions in other European countries. For a sense of some of this, see Elizabeth Ingalls, Whaling Prints in the Francis B. Lothrop Collection (Salem, MA: The Peabody Museum of Salem, 1987).

³⁵ “Natural History,” Columbian, 4 April 1814, p. 3.

³⁶ Columbian, 28 April 1814, p. 2.

³⁷ Cited in Joel J. Orosz, Curators and Culture: The Museum Movement in America, 1740–1870 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), p. 75. Periodic plugs for the institution turned up in the Commercial Advertiser, suggesting Scudder had an “in” there. See, for instance, pieces from 2 May 1812, 9 December 1819, etc.

³⁸ A Correspondent, “Cultivation of Natural History in the University College of New York,” American Medical and Philosophical Register 2 (1811), pp. 154–163, at p. 161.

³⁹ Haines to James Pemberton Parke, 5 April 1814, folder 136, box 15, series ii, Wyck Collection, Papers of Reuben Haines III, American Philosophical Society Manuscripts Library; emphases in original. This letter is misdated as 1813 (by Haines himself), but Parke helpfully noted the date he received the letter, 7 April 1814, in an annotation that underlines Haines’s error.

⁴⁰ The dimensions and layout of Scudder’s space are given in the Commercial Advertiser, 9 December 1819, p. 2. See also Orosz, Curators and Culture, p. 77.

⁴¹ “New-York Institution,” American Monthly Magazine and Critical Review 1 (1817), pp. 271–273, at p. 271.

⁴² American Monthly Magazine and Critical Review 1 (1817), p. 455.

⁴³ John Pintard, Letters from John Pintard (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1940), vol. 1, p. 60, letter of 15 April 1817.

⁴⁴ Columbian, 31 December 1818.

⁴⁵ Pintard, Letters, vol. 1, p. 203, letter of 4 July 1819.

⁴⁶ The point is made by Orosz, Curators and Culture, p. 79. See also Charles Willson Peale, The Collected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and his Family, 1735–1885 (Millwood, NY: KTO Microform, 1980), microfiche II B, card 22, diary no. 22, circa 1 June, 4 June, and 10 June 1817.

⁴⁷ David R. Brigham, “Social Class and Participation in Peale’s Philadelphia Museum,” in Alderson, Mermaids, Mummies, and Mastodons, p. 86.

⁴⁸ Single tickets were twenty-five cents for general admission, but special shows (for instance the celebrated mastodon) could demand an additional fee of fifty cents or more. Orosz, Curators and Culture, p. 84. The pursuit of the mastodon in North America is a choice tale of sensation and science in the early Republic. See Paul Semonin, American Monster: How the Nation’s First Prehistoric Creature Became a Symbol of National Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2000). For a complementary perspective, see Claudine Cohen, The Fate of the Mammoth: Fossils, Myth, and History (Chicago: Universtiy of Chicago Press, 2002).

⁴⁹ Orosz, Curators and Culture, p. 87.

⁵⁰ Biographical information on nearly all the jurors can be gleaned from period newspapers. See, for instance: Spectator, 9 April 1819, p. 1 (for a mention of Hick’s commission as an auctioneer); the classified advertisement in the Commercial Advertiser, 21 May 1816, p. 1 (for Underhill’s wares); or Evening Post, 8 January 1821, p. 1 (for the sale of Wilmerding’s establishment). In general, jurors in this period were drawn from a relatively small pool of reasonably well-to-do men.

⁵¹ This is almost certainly not the animal we now know as the leopard seal (Hydrurga leptonyx [Blainville, 1820]), which is exclusively Antarctic. American sealers had surely encountered these top predators in the deep southern ocean, but it seems unlikely they would have bothered to bring one all the way back for Scudder. “Leopard” as a term designating spotted coloration has long been so common that it is more probable that Scudder simply means a seal with spots (perhaps the ringed seal, Pusa hispida [Schreber, 1775]?).

⁵² The first was presumably a killer whale, the last probably a harbor porpoise. Mitchill not only took notes on these specimens, but also quibbled about Scudder’s identifications. In the Issacher Cozzens Portfolio Print Collection at the New-York Historical Society (an assortment of sketches and prints that includes a considerable amount of original Mitchill material) there appears a small pencil sketch of a cetacean (PR 145, #67, center of bottom row) that is labeled in Mitchill’s hand “Scudder’s mus. 15 feet long, D. globiceps? called bottlenose there,” which suggests Mitchill thought what Scudder called a bottlenose was more likely a pilot whale. On the Cozzens Collection, see Jenny Gotwals, “Portfolio of a Curious Mind: The Issachar Cozzens Collection,” New-York Journal of American History 65, no. 4 (2004), pp. 48–57.

⁵³ Compare, however, a slightly later vernacular taxonomy (Hardie’s enumeration of the creatures for sale in the New York markets), where several species of fresh- and saltwater turtles are listed under the category “Amphibious.” James Hardie, The Description of the City of New-York (New York: Samuel Marks, 1827), p. 184.

⁵⁴ It is interesting to notice that here Scudder listed his jaw as that of a “scrag whale,” not a Balaena mysticetus. Whaling buffs may wish to meditate on this, since it is certainly odd. The term “Scrag” appears in Paul Dudley, “An Essay upon the Natural History of Whales” (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 33 [1725], pp. 256–269), and is now generally thought to correspond to what is today called the “gray whale” (Eschrichtius robustus [Lilljeborg, 1861]). It should be emphasized that the retrojection of species names is a very difficult matter, and it seems that the term “scrag” was used quite loosely in this period. Did Scudder in 1819 perhaps have another whale jaw, one from what we would now consider a gray whale? It seems impossible: Scudder lists the jaw in question as “containing 300 pieces of bone,” but this is considerably more than the top end of the range found in Eschrichtius; moreover, most evidence suggests that in historical times grays have been an exclusively Pacific species, and it is quite certain they were hunted almost not at all by Anglo-American whalers in that region before the middle of the nineteenth century (but compare F. C. Fraser, “An Early 17th-Century Record of the Californian Grey Whale in Icelandic Waters,” Investigations on Cetacea 2 [1970], pp. 13–20). For these reasons (as well as the fanfare of 1814, which makes it clear that a whale jaw coming into the city made a splash) it seems very unlikely that Scudder had secured an additional whale jaw from a gray whale. Moreover, he would also have had to have sold the whale jaw he acquired in 1814, since no other jaw is listed in the 1819 inventory, but there is little reason to think he would have done this at any point through these years of expansion. Nevertheless, since “scrag” generally came to imply a whale having commercially valueless baleen, it seems strange that the jaw of a large mysticete whale could be called that of a “scrag,” in view of the fact that rights and bowheads had the longest and most commercially valuable “whalebone” of all. A stumper.

⁵⁵ The line is from Henry IV, Part I, act 3, scene 3, where it functions as an off-color comment about the tavern hostess.

⁵⁶ “Very like a whale” is Polonius’s whatever-you-say reply to Hamlet’s musing on the shape of clouds in Hamlet, act 3, scene 2. The expression was a commonplace in the early nineteenth century. See, for instance, Carolina Sentinel, 20 March 1819, p. 4 (where the phrase serves as an italicized snicker after the report of a tall tale).

⁵⁷ IWF, p. 13.

⁵⁸ Ibid., p. 14.

⁵⁹ Ibid., p. 22.

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 29.

⁶¹ Ibid., p. 39.

⁶² Ibid., p. 75.

⁶³ Ibid., p. 29.

⁶⁴ Drake, Poems, p. 28. The misspelling of Mitchill’s name and the unusual conjugation of the verb “sing” are given here as they appear in the original.