SAMUEL LATHAM MITCHILL AND NATURAL HISTORY IN NEW YORK CITY
Samuel Latham Mitchill, who had published an American edition of Erasmus Darwin’s earthy Zoonomia, was not a man afraid to speak out loud about the loves of plants and animals; indeed, he was not a man afraid to speak out loud on most any topic. Almost thirty years after the doctor’s death, in an eloge entitled Reminiscences of Samuel Latham Mitchill, M.D., LL.D., Mitchill’s younger contemporary, the memoirist and man-about-town John W. Francis, would recall that “It was a common remark among our citizens—‘Tap the Doctor at any time, and he will flow.’”1 If admiring, the comment captures something of a collective civic wink at the irrepressible energies, the polyglot enthusiasms, the distinguished eccentricities of New York’s most publicly universal gentleman of the early nineteenth century, a man known variously as the “living encyclopedia,” as a “stalking library,” and (to his admired Jefferson) as the “Congressional Dictionary.”2 Because it was Mitchill above all who embodied the contentious new zoology in the trial of Maurice v. Judd, it is necessary to take a moment to review his biography, and to consider what he knew about whales and their place in nature.3
For all his cosmopolitan aplomb, Mitchill was native to New York, born in 1764 as the son of a respectable Quaker farming family in the county of Queens, on Long Island. His medical education began with a two-year apprenticeship (1781–1783) to Dr. Samuel Bard, physician in the city of New York, who had himself studied at Edinburgh and encouraged his pupil to do likewise. The generosity of an uncle bankrolled Mitchill’s three years overseas, and he returned to New York in 1786 with a medical degree from the “Athens of Britain,” and the polish acquired during a tour on the Continent and a residency in London. He settled into the practice of medicine in the city, but soon found his attentions drawn to consuming questions of political order then the central preoccupation of the young Republic. Taking up the study of law, Mitchill came to the attention of Governor George Clinton, and entered public service as a commissioner in cession negotiations with the Iroquois Indians in the western part of the state. By 1790 he had been elected a state assemblyman, and his participation in a host of clubs and civic associations in the city over the next decade (in combination with the emerging friendship of DeWitt Clinton, a growing commitment to the Jeffersonian Republicans, and marriage to the prominent and wealthy Catherine Cock, widow of the successful shipbuilder Samuel Akerly), positioned this young professor of natural history at Columbia College (who had maintained a successful practice as a physician) to make a run for national office. In 1800 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives; four years later he would be nominated by the New York legislature to take over a vacated Senate seat, which he would occupy for five years. Additional terms in both the state legislature and the U.S. House would follow, bringing Mitchill back to New York City for good in 1813. From that point until his death in 1831 he was among the most prominent figures in the city: a founding member, member, honorary member, or corresponding member of some four dozen societies (a fact that did not go unmocked); a durable supporter of Mayor/Governor Clinton (whose controversial Erie Canal project he strongly endorsed); variously a professor in chemistry, botany, agriculture, and natural history; a projector in surveying and resource assessment in and beyond the state of New York; a perennial voice on matters of hygiene, physic, and philosophies natural and moral, classically recondite and fashionably French. He founded journals, published his correspondence with men of learning in the United States and abroad, and endorsed a clutch of products and schemes that fit with his vision of health, national improvement, and ambitiously Jeffersonian ideals for the Republic. The most colorful effort to encompass the scope and verve of this multifarious philosopher may be a paragraph from Francis’s Old New York:
Ancient and modern languages were unlocked to him, and a wide range in physical science, the pabulum of his intellectual repast. An essay on composts, a tractate on the deaf and dumb, verses to Septon or to the Indian tribes, might be eliminated from his mental alembic within the compass of a few hours. He was now engaged with the anatomy of the egg, and now deciphering a Babylonian brick; now involved in the nature of meteoric stones, now on the different species of brassica; now on the evaporization of fresh water, now on that of salt; now offering suggestions to Garnet, of New Jersey, the correspondent of Mark Akenside, on the angle of the windmill, and now concurring with Michaux on the beauty of the black walnut as ornamental for parlor furniture. In the morning he might be found composing songs for the nursery, at noon dietetically experimenting and writing on fishes, or unfolding a new theory of terrine formations, and at evening addressing his fair readers on the healthy influences of the alkalis, and the depurative virtues of whitewashing.4
In short, he aspired to be a Masonic sage of the Scottish Enlightenment, one who deployed his wisdom in the service of a patriotic Jeffersonian nationalism. His misfortune, historically speaking, was finally to achieve this lofty goal in the very same years that saw both these projects become quaint relics of another era.
It is this early nineteenth-century watershed that accounts in large part for the darkening tincture of ostentatious respect and patronizing bemusement that attended Mitchill in his final decade (and a hint of which can be discerned in the trial of Maurice v. Judd): the founder of institutions became himself an institution; the collector of artifacts became, in a manner of speaking, an artifact. By the end he could be eulogized as “one who knew all things on earth and in the waters of the deep,” even as it was acknowledged that the breadth of his erudition (and his taste for pomp and posture) made him, truth be told, more effective as a promoter of the sciences than as a proper contributor to that enterprise, an enterprise which was increasingly understood—in the terms dictated by Benjamin Silliman and Joseph Henry—as the domain of sober specialists, rather than flamboyant gentlemen-érudits.5
It might be argued that 1818–1819 represented the very cusp of this change, and that the trial itself (as I will argue in the conclusion) played a role in ushering Mitchill from his ascendancy; but what is essential to recall in looking at Mitchill’s testimony in Maurice v. Judd is that in December of 1818 Mitchill was, without question, the most prominent man of science in the state of New York, an unparalleled authority on questions of natural order and a powerfully positioned patron-administrator of the institutions of learning on the fair island of Manahata. Moreover, he would remain close to the vanguard of the scientific culture of the city for some years to come: unlike other philanthropic naturalist-improvers of his age (for instance, DeWitt Clinton himself, who in many ways gave shape to the ideal in New York in this period) Mitchill retained a close connection to an emerging younger generation—men like Peter Cooper, John Torrey, and James Ellsworth DeKay—whose idea of a scientific society left no room for coin collecting or second-rate philology. Mitchill’s Lyceum of Natural History was the gravitational center for the “zeal of these aspiring youths” (to quote John Pintard, who warned presciently that this clique would “eclipse the old Societies”), and the efforts of these upstarts to keep Clinton out of their new society has rightly been seen both as a symbolic changing of the guard, and as an indication that Mitchill—who objected to the exclusion of his longtime friend and ally, but who chaired the meetings that voted the blackball—had the mettle to endure, despite his patina, in a way that distinguished him from most of the other men of his generation.
The explanation for his good standing in this “proto-professional” scientific community lies in the great success of Mitchill’s lectures in natural history at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. It is no exaggeration to say that Mitchill had himself built New York’s nascent community of scientific specialists through his teaching. Of the twenty-one founding members of the new Lyceum, for instance, twelve were associated with the new college, and at least ten of the early members were either students or recent graduates—all of whom had attended Mitchill’s celebrated, synthetic, hands-on, and even “research-oriented” course, which met daily from one to two p.m., beginning the first Monday in November and running through to the last day of February.6 This amounted to more than ninety “discourses,” presented to classes ranging well over fifty students, covering minerology, botany, and zoology, and demanding field trips to Hosack’s botanical garden in the northern suburbs (now Rockefeller Center), as well as visits to several natural history cabinets in the city, including, as we have seen, Scudder’s. The course had a long life span. Begun in 1809 (when Mitchill was briefly back in New York between legislative appointments), it ran with few interruptions to the end of Mitchill’s active life: in 1826, at the age of 62, he wrote with pride to Clinton that “I have been successful in the course of lectures to an unprecedented degree,” and that, with eighty presentations behind him, he had yet to miss a single meeting.7
It is a testimony to the reputation and impact of this course that several sets of student notes taken by Mitchill’s pupils survive, not to mention at least one not-so-flattering notebook-doodle caricature of the great (and bulbous) man in action on the podium [Plate 5]. These materials (admittedly more the former) offer a superb opportunity to understand how Mitchill configured the natural world, and how he taught the classificatory sciences that he brought to the bar in Maurice v. Judd. The notes reveal that Mitchill presented lectures dynamically engaged with contemporary continental authorities and changing ideas about the earth and its inhabitants, lectures that propounded the virtues of the new comparative anatomy while underscoring the significance of natural history for a young nation. It was a course designed to attract and prepare natural history practitioners, and to ensure that they were familiar with the most up-to-date work being done in the field.
For instance, G. S. Townsend, who attended the 1816–1817 course, carefully inscribed in his notebook at the start of the lectures on the animal kingdom: “The Parisians have gone far ahead of any other people in zoology,” and beside that Townsend copied down the mantra of the new taxonomy, “Zoology is built upon the base of anatomy.”8 He went on to record some of Mitchill’s statements verbatim, or at least in the professor’s own voice, writing: “In tracing ans [animals] I shall begin, with nature, with the most simple. I have the authority of Lamarque, Dumeril + Cuvier.”
Such references to “authority” were not at all deployed to foreclose debate. On the contrary, Mitchill embarked on the taxonomy of the animal world by underlining that even the basic boundaries of this seemingly self-evident grouping were by no means uncontested. Reflecting a familiarity with Lamarck’s work on the “animaux sans vertèbres,” Mitchill presented the seemingly fundamental category of “animals” as itself a fundamental problem. Quoting again from Townsend’s notes:
What is an animal? It may appear plain to distinguish … the horse from that on which he feeds. but so mysterious are the incipient traces of animality that it is one of the most puzzling questions to distinguish anl. [animal] from veg[etable]. The stom[ach] is no critereon for there are whole classes without stom[ach]. or a gastric! An’l [animals] are said to have a nervous system, but there are large classes without brain or nerves! Generative orgs. [organs] were supposed characteristic, i.e. organs whereby an an. [animal] was enabled to perpetuate their own species, but there are anl’ [animals] without them & which propagate their kind like vegetables i.e. by being split up! Neither is locomotion charactc [characteristic] for the oyster is fixed … 9
The exclamation points prick young Master Townsend’s ledger book throughout, and they fairly bark Mitchill’s gift for imbuing his subject with urgency and surprise.
An account like this emphasized above all that taxonomy could be a matter for argument and debate, and that natural history was by no means a static collection of facts. Another of Mitchill’s students, commenting on an earlier version of the class, emphasized how Mitchill continuously and explicitly positioned his own views with respect to other authorities, and always made clear to his students how and why such departures were necessary. For instance, Mitchill espoused his own mineralogical terminology (closely related to his ideas about the significance of oxygen and phlogiston, which he treated extensively in his work on “septon” and the virtues of the alkalis), and he reconfigured the classes within the Linnaean botanical scheme (placing the “cryptogamia”—plants like the mosses that did not appear to grow from seeds—at the head of the order). “This innovating temper of the professor is not limited to systems of mineralogy and botany,” wrote one pupil, commenting on Mitchill’s style after taking the course, “he carries it with him into his zoology, and he transposes the classes of animals with still greater freedom.”10 This meant, as this former student went on to explain, that “he follows in the main the system of Cuvier, who founded the classification upon their internal organization and anatomical constitution; but he inverts and transposes it for the purpose of greater perspicuity.”11
This “inversion” and various other transpositions all aimed to make the different branches of natural history conform more closely to a stepwise scala naturae, whereby Mitchill’s lessons (mirroring the Divine plan) could proceed from inanimate matter, up through plants in order of increasing complexity, and then into the animal kingdom, beginning with the most plant-like creatures, and building up to the mammals, under which heading he discussed the orders in such a way as to “climax” with his lectures on human beings (order, Primates)—the topic with which the later versions of the course closed. Mitchill particularly prized his finale: a set of rousing discourses on the “aboriginals of Fredonia” and the natural history of mankind.12
What is significant about all this is less that Mitchill continued to use a version of the (increasingly outmoded) “great chain of being” as the armature of his course, than that he insisted upon teaching natural history as a subject demanding judgment and argument, a subject in which dissent was possible, and new ideas and new facts mattered.13
Mitchill also knew how to endow the subject with urgency and theater. His object-centered teaching put materials before students’ eyes and even in their hands.14 For instance his opening lecture was built around three carefully chosen objects, tokens of the three kingdoms of nature, but each endowed with a particular power: for the animal kingdom, Mitchill would declare, “I present you with the weapon of the stingray,” before dilating on the local species found in the Long Island Sound, the dangers occasioned by the animal’s wound, and the fact that it was safe to eat, should his young listeners ever find themselves shipwrecked (or, for instance, in France, where, Mitchill the cosmopolite noted, it was “eaten voraciously”); the mineralogical specimen was a lump of arsenic ore from a large vein up the Hudson Valley, which contained “enough, as I told a French Chemist here, to poison the universe” (a fact calculated to seize the youthful imagination), and Mitchill went on to discuss the importance of arsenic in the molding of spherical shot (a proper topic for a lecturer who held the office of “Surgeon General of the Militia” in New York, and who had assisted in drafting the city’s fortifications during the War of 1812); finally, as a specimen from the vegetable world Mitchill offered a sample of “spurred rye” or ergot, and he gave his opinion of its use in accelerating childbirth. Central to this showy opening lecture was the fact that each of these was a “sample of American productions,” for Mitchill made much of the significance of natural history in the United States, where, as he put it, “beauty, novelty, and sublimity characterize creation to a much greater degree than in any part of the old world”—it was, he explained to his class, “a fortunate occurrence for a student of nature, to be born in the United States.”15
A dynamic science, taught with objects, central to the life of the new Republic: Townsend’s notes for zoology lecture 8 of 1816 wonderfully exemplify how Mitchill’s course wove together these three preoccupations. Announcing to the students that an exciting discovery would have to preempt the ordinary lecture, Mitchill proceeded to read aloud a letter he had just received from a state surveyor at work in western New York, who had sent along three pickled fish-skins from the Finger and Great Lakes. Displaying one of the skins, Mitchill announced that it appeared to be in the family of the cod, though the fish had come from a body of fresh water in the interior, a fact that prompted deep reflection about terrestrial and organic change. Townsend copied Mitchill’s grave remarks: “he was an inhabitant of the ocean when there and has survived the changes that have occurred and now lives in fresh water, but still lean and poor. He never grows yet though he propagates his kind.” Here was an unexpected lesson: proof of profound secular change resided at the bottom of the western lakes. And Mitchill knew how to endow the mutability of the earth with political significance for the nation: he famously marshaled the idea of the historical contingency of geology as an argument in support of Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, since it was in the nature of landforms to change, with or without the consent of nations.16
This close review of Mitchill’s teaching shows how he built a celebrated course that dramatized natural history as a vigorous and important enterprise. By doing so he became the most public scientific figure in the city of New York in the early nineteenth century, and drew around himself a community of younger naturalists taken with the investigation of the natural world. But the notes scribbled by Mitchill’s students do more than lift the curtain on his podium performances. They also demonstrate the degree to which he continued to develop his thinking long after his own student years in Europe. The work of Lisa Rosner and others on medical education in Edinburgh in the late eighteenth century conveys a clear sense of the kind of training that Mitchill would have received in chemistry (where he studied with Joseph Black, who stimulated Mitchill’s interest in the phlogiston debates), in botany (taught by John Hope, who was at the end of his career during Mitchill’s tenure), and most importantly, in anatomy, which was taught in those years by Alexander Munro “secundus” (as he was known), the most popular of the great dynasty of Edinburgh “philosophical anatomists.” That course ended with a survey of comparative anatomy, and it is safe to assume that it was in those lectures that Mitchill had his first rigorous exposure to the anatomical basis of animal classification (Parisian natural history was at this time represented better in Edinburgh than anywhere else in the English-speaking world).17 But while Mitchill would later write in praise of his Edinburgh education, invoking his “able masters” and musing on his “tours around that great seat of learning” and his “excursions to the mountains” to study geognosy, he was acutely aware of how rapidly things had changed in natural history in the years since he had returned. Recalling his student days, Mitchill wrote in 1818 that
During several visits to London I became an industrious visitor to museums, libraries, galleries, and even the environs of the city. The rapid and increasing march of knowledge since I was there has outdone all former example.
And the same could be said for Paris:
While I resided in Paris, I endeavored to acquire as much information as possible from the admirable institutions there. But the present constellation of science had not then risen.18
These comments highlight the degree to which Mitchill’s engagement with continental developments in natural history was a product of his reading. Books kept him abreast of the new French comparative anatomy, and it was out of his store of fresh-from-the-press texts that he built his lectures; the same books served as the references at his elbow as he composed his monographic studies in natural history, saliently his “Fishes of New-York.” While no inventory of Mitchill’s library survives, hints lie scattered in various places, making it possible to recover a number of Mitchill’s key texts, and even to catch glimpses of how he used those books in the practice of natural history.
For instance, in 1818, shortly before the trial of Maurice v. Judd, Mitchill published an American edition of a work by Cuvier entitled Essay on the Theory of the Earth; this was in fact a reprint of the translation of Cuvier’s “Preliminary Discourse” that had been commissioned by Robert Jameson and published at Edinburgh with his notes and commentary in 1813. To this already composite text Mitchill added an extensive appendix on the relevant North American fossils, and on the potential importance of New World specimens to Cuvier’s ideas. While this might suggest that Mitchill’s contact with French works was wholly mediated through (questionable) English translations, this was not the case. In fact, in 1807 Mitchill published a detailed abstract of the 344-page Zoologie Analytique of Constant Duméril, a work that had appeared less than a year earlier in Paris, and that engaged closely with the classifications of both Geoffroy and Cuvier. This indicates the speed with which such works could cross the Atlantic and, via Mitchill, become part of the conversation around natural history classification in the United States.19 It is clear from other sources that Mitchill had read Cuvier’s three-volume Leçons d’Anatomie Comparée of 1805 in addition to that author’s older Tableau Elémentaire de l’Histoire Naturelle des Animaux (1797).20 So attentive was Mitchill to the importance of staying on top of the classificatory enterprises of the Paris Museum, that no sooner had Cuvier’s four-volume Règne Animal come off the presses than Mitchill preoccupied himself with securing a set for the library of the new Lyceum of Natural History. It was, in the end, the first book for which the society paid out of collective funds.21 They accepted donations, of course, but such choice and important volumes could not reliably be secured merely by waiting for a fortuitous gift.
Nor did Mitchill simply file such texts on the shelf or merely crib from them in preparing his lectures. He used them energetically in investigating specimens, and in evaluating the productions of American nature, stacking volumes open on his desk and setting their assessments against each other. In doing so he pointed up their strengths and weaknesses, and composed works of his own which were in conversation with these books, and supplementary to them. The best glimpse of this active process is provided by the original work that cemented Mitchill’s reputation as an innovator and contributor in the science of classification, “The Fishes of New-York,” a 150-page illustrated monograph ichthyological published in 1815 in the first volume of the Transactions of the Literary and Philosophical Society of New-York, and updated and expanded over the next ten years in a series of supplements issued in various other journals. In the preface to the original work, Mitchill offered a valuable sketch of the process of collation and bibliographical scrutiny that supplemented his early morning expeditions to the fish market:
I have had before me, during my inquiries, the Leyden copy of the Museum Ichthyologicum by L. T. Gronovius, 1754 fol., Castel’s French edition of Bloch’s Histoire Naturelle des Poissons, Paris, 10 tom. 12mo 1801; Gmelin’s edition of Linne’s Systema Naturae, with Turton’s English translation; and the ichthyological part of Shaw’s General Zoology, as published in London.22
Mitchill wrote that these, along with “Catesby and Edwards,” were “constantly at my elbow.” By evaluating the skeletal character (bony or cartilaginous) of his specimens, and counting the rays of their fins, Mitchill was able to assign each of his New York fish to one of the six orders recognized by Shaw, and to compare the products of the New York waters with the species and varieties enumerated by European authorities. It was said that Cuvier himself praised “The Fishes of New-York,” and there is good evidence that Mitchill maintained a private correspondence with Lacépède in the years that followed its publication, Lacépède being the author of the standard five-volume Histoire Naturelle des Poissons.23
We may say of this place as Sprat, in his History of the Royal Society, said of London: “it has a large intercourse with all the earth; it is, as the poets describe their house of fame, a city where all the noises and business in the world do meet and therefore this honor is justly due to it, to be the constant place of residence for that knowledge which is made up of the reports and intelligence of all countries.”24
And out of the spark and whirl of continuous, competitive merchant reconnaissance, enlightenment would blaze, since “science, like fire, is put in motion by collision.”25
Mitchill placed this ideal—of a science kindled by the friction of commerce, and ventilated by the commonweal—at the center of his program for an American natural history. It was this vision, spangled with a democratic and populist enthusiasm, that came to the fore in Mitchill’s rhetoric on the occasion of the founding of a short-lived scientific society at the turn of the century, when he announced that the aim of the organization was to “arm every hand with a [geologist’s] hammer, and every eye with a telescope.”26 Where zoology was concerned, Mitchill spelled out a similarly inclusive program in an interesting circular, printed by the New-York Historical Society in 1817. The purpose of this flyer was to drum up support for the Society’s natural history collection, and to expand a network of informants and contributors around New York and beyond: In the pursuit of “facts, specimens, drawings and books” Mitchill put out the call “that all citizens may be solicited to exert themselves … that much may be accomplished with very little cost.” Because the city of New York “may be considered as a center surrounded by wonders” of minerals, fossils, plants, and animals, “all hands must be employed” in the harvest. Mitchill then went through the different classes of zoology, addressing himself, taxon by taxon, to the relevant tradesmen and merchants: Where ichthyology was concerned, the manifest local and national importance of the New York fisheries meant that “no additional recommendation is necessary, further than to ask of our fellow-citizens all manner of communications.” Continuing, he exhorted that “contributions toward the natural history of the Mammalia may be expected from the fur merchants, furriers, and hunters. Almost everything known under the titles of FURS and PELTRIES passes through our city or is contained within it.” Moreover, he went on, “zoological research is promoted in several ways by foreign commerce. Living animals are frequently imported … and cargoes, and even ballast, often contain excellent specimens, both of the animal and the fossil kinds.” Even the scrapings from the hulls of vessels ought to be perused “before they are disturbed for the purpose of cleaning and repairing.” Nor was this collaborative project limited to passing along specimens to the central cabinets of the city. Mitchill wanted the citizens to become practitioners of the most up-to-date approaches in zoology. The circular explained that
Anatomy is the basis of improved zoology. The classification of animals is founded upon their organization. This can be ascertained only by dissection. The use of the knife is recommended for the purpose of acquiring an acquaintance with the structure of animals. It is proposed that the members avail themselves of all opportunities to cultivate COMPARATIVE ANATOMY, and to communicate the result of their labors and researches to the society.27
At his death in 1831 Samuel Latham Mitchill could be remembered as having been the patriarch of natural history in New York City for more than thirty years. This chapter has thus far reviewed the ideas, activities, and institutions that he nurtured during the first decades of the nineteenth century in order to show several things: first, that Mitchill’s teaching and publishing aimed to build a community of natural history practitioners in the United States in this period, practitioners who were informed about the latest teachings of the new zoology coming out of the Paris school, and who could contribute to the global project of taxonomy and comparative anatomy; second, that Mitchill conceived of a collaborative and distributed program of natural historical investigations in the United States—one centered in a particular way on New York City—that would not only take advantage of the proximity of a distinctive American nature, but would also tap the mercantile circulations that flowed through the commercial heart of Manhattan. The citizens of this community, mustered to this collective project, would reap material, intellectual, and even spiritual benefits from the enterprise. Indeed, specifically moral edification was not to be overlooked. As one of Mitchill’s students put it: “There was a wholesome natural theology, blended somewhat after the manner of Paley,” in Mitchill’s lectures.28 Mitchill himself, speaking of a proper cabinet in natural history (where the whole of the terraqueous globe might be drawn together), averred: “Let the philosopher survey the whole and draw wise and pious conclusions.”29 And not just philosophers: as the New-York Historical Society’s circular of 1817 demonstrates, so deeply was Mitchill committed to teaching the Republic about the virtues of comparative anatomy, that even before the case of Maurice v. Judd, he had taken to postering the city with broadsheets encouraging the citizenry at large to take up the scalpel in the pursuit of the order of nature.
This “ornament to his country” (as opposing counsel John Anthon called him) was late. When he arrived, he apologized for keeping the court waiting, and without further delay he embarked upon a defense of Judd’s claim that a whale was not a fish, grounding that claim, from the very start, in the kind of democratic and centripetal natural knowledge that Mitchill passionately espoused. He announced:
New-York is a point into which much information centers. Men departing from this point circumnavigate the globe, voyaging from the arctic to the antarctic regions. From this class of my fellow citizens, much of the information I possess on this subject has been derived; and as a man of science, I can say positively, that a whale is no more a fish than a man; nobody pretends to the contrary now-a-days, but lawyers and politicians.30
It was an opening statement calculated to emphasize not his Edinburgh erudition, or his continental correspondents, but his cherished image of natural-historical New York, poised at the center of a network of worldly informants. At the same time it was, to an ambitious degree, an assertion that aimed to ally his position not with the learned elites of the city, but rather with the world of the docks and the Tontine Coffeehouse (the meeting place at Wall and Water streets where speculators and magnates rubbed shoulders and cut shipping deals), the world of the merchant traders, seal-hunters, and tars, with their global reach.31
But it was also a stance that opened Mitchill to a savvy cross-examination, one that undermined his effort to ventriloquize the “everymen” of maritime New York, and that began instead to maneuver him onto the more circumscribed authority of the suspect and alien “new philosophy” of Parisian zoology. Mitchill’s primary antagonist, William Sampson (who, like his co-counsel Anthon, adorned his examination with ostentatious reverence for Mitchill’s sagacity), pressed the doctor on the question of just what, exactly, “common” wisdom instructed on the question, forcing Mitchill to acknowledge, with some exasperation, that
The great bulk of mankind that speak English, would call a whale a fish, and they would say the same of a crab or a clam, and with them I would not dispute the question. If I was to go into the market amongst my Long-Island friends, I would not debate the question whether the lobster were a fish or a crustaceous animal, or whether a clam were a shell fish or a mollusca.
And thus, Mitchill conceded, it might happen that laws would be framed in ways at odds with the lineaments of nature, since, as he noted proudly
The legislature, to the honor of our democracy, consists of all classes of men. It is one of the felicities of our form of government, that all classes are represented.32
From the very start of his testimony, Mitchill tried to stand his position on a vernacular natural history embedded in his vision of a dynamic, worldly, democratic republic where the knowledge of nature was integral to practical progress and national virtue. As this opening exchange suggests, it would be a tricky matter. Countering this populist position, it would be the art of the plaintiff’s lawyers to depict Mitchill’s taxonomy, by contrast, as a foreign import, an unseemly innovation, and as the peculiar domain of an eccentric minority of “philosophers.” At stake, then, was more than merely the question of whether whales were fish. At stake was the status and standing of natural history—the value and place of scientific knowledge—in the Republic.
Mitchill’s second effort to buttress his “paradox” drew in a similar way on the familiar, rather than on invocations of exogenous or specialized learning: from the world of maritime New York, Mitchill moved to the tradition of pious natural theology within which he always sought to work. Answering Anthon’s opening argument about the taxonomy of Genesis, Mitchill asked the court to return to verses 20 and 21 of chapter 1. Taking the Bible in hand, Mitchill read the verses and offered his own gloss on the lines:
And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and let fowl fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
From these two lines Mitchill argued that “the formation of whales was a distinct exertion of the creative power from the creation of fishes,” since the waters “brought forth abundantly” before the specific invocation of the creation of whales. For Mitchill, that initial “teeming” represented the creation of ordinary fish, and the whales were mentioned separately in the next verse because of their distinctive nature.
This Talmudic exegesis met with skepticism from Sampson: after all, he protested, the word “fish” nowhere appeared in the initial creative act. To which Mitchill replied: “The word fish may not be used, but the inference is obvious.” At this point the recorder himself, the judge, intervened, for clarification, asking Mitchill if he meant to assert that “on the fifth day these large cetaceous animals were formed by a distinct exertion of Divine power, and were of a distinct formation?” To which Mitchill replied:
I do. It was a distinct creation by the Almighty power after he had created the other marine animals, although all were made on the same day. I mean to say, that from this it may be implied, that the cete was a distinct creature, and so the able writer of that chapter has described it; and a great man he was. He knew the difference between a whale and a fish. It is a luminous text, and displays great learning, and throws great light upon this subject.33
Sampson suggested that there would be occasion to return to scriptural classifications before the trial ended, and the questioning turned to the technical matters of classification, and the scientific basis for Mitchill’s shocking opening assertion, “that a whale is no more a fish than a man.”
“NO MORE A FISH THAN A MAN”
Before turning to the heart of Mitchill’s taxonomic testimony, and Sampson’s efforts to undermine it, we need to take a moment to consider just what Mitchill himself knew about whales. What was the status of the cetes in the classificatory texts that Mitchill knew, and what additional access did he have to these unusual animals?
We are fortunate to have an invaluable source as a point of departure on this question: Mitchill’s own lecture notes for that portion of his course in natural history, notes that look to have been drafted in the 1810s and supplemented with later annotations.34 While Mitchill’s three surviving lecture notebooks are not complete, they do include the relevant section of the “Mammalia” lectures, in which Mitchill emphasized the distinguishing characteristics of the class as a whole—“they give suck and are viviparous; all the ova they have if any are in the ovaria, the evolution of it [sic] depends upon the stimulus of a fluid emitted from an instrument of the male called penis intrans, have double hearts, a warm red blood circulating through aortic, pulmonic and hepatic systems”—before turning to the first order, the Cetae. There, Mitchill opened his lecture to his students with a discussion of the very problem that would be before the court in 1818:
It may seem strange to you that whales are not put under fish, for that is the common term applied to them—but they are not fish, they breathe thro’ spiracles by lungs, copulate by penis intrans, have warm red blood <e teats near the anus >& suckle their young by teats. Character: spiracles for breathing placed on forepart of scull [sic]—come up occasionally to breathe by these, have no feet, pectoral fins without nails or claws, tail horizontal, fish all have perpend. tails.35
He went on to list a dozen species, including the narwhale, the sperm, the mysticetus, and the smaller dolphins and porpoises.
This source gives us a very clear sense of the position Mitchill gave to the cetaceans in his teaching at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and the confidence with which he instructed students that whales were not fish. Where did Mitchill get this idea?
For starters, it is true that, by 1818, the preponderance of zoological authorities had ceased to classify whales and dolphins with the fish. But the process of that move had been slow, it remained incomplete, and, as I suggested in chapter 1, the move itself had been central to the reformulation of zoological classification in the second half of the eighteenth century. The seventeenth-century English anatomist John Ray—whose joint work with Francis Willughby, De Historia Piscium (1686), served as the ichthyological benchmark for more than sixty years—spelled out the problem in 1693 in his Synopsis Methodica. Even though Ray recognized a fundamental distinction between pulmonary respiration and the respiration by gills—and saw (as Aristotle had) that this would seem to rank whales and dolphins with red-blooded terrestrial animals—he nevertheless stood by the ordering of De Historia Piscium, which included “cetaceous fishes” as one of the primary divisions of the class of fish:
In order not to place ourselves at too great a distance from common opinion, and to avoid charges of gratuitous innovation, we shall classify the cetacean genus of aquatic creatures together with the fish,—even though they appear to correspond with the viviparous quadrupeds on essentially all points, except for hair, feet, and the element in which they live.36
Indeed, this very problem had helped give shape to the definition of fish in De Historia Piscium, where gills were not mentioned: “Aquatic animal, lacking feet, with naked skin or scales, swimming by means of fins, living perpetually in the water, and never of its own volition coming out onto dry land.”37
What is seldom appreciated is that this ordering—of whales as fish—endured through the first nine editions of the presiding taxonomic authority of the eighteenth century, Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae. Thus as late as 1756, Linnaeus—who since 1744 had defined breasts as “the essential characteristic of the ‘Quadrupeds’ ”; and who knew very well that the cetes, as well as the manatees, gave suck to their young—remained committed to an order of cetaceans and manatees (collectively, the “Plagiures”) ranked as a subdivision of the fishes, though he too felt it necessary to explain this seemingly anomalous grouping:
All the animals of this order more readily bring to mind the Quadrupeds than the Fish, when we consider their internal structure: lungs, respiration, breasts, feet, appendages, live birth, etc. all indicate as much. We attach them, nevertheless to the Fishes by reason of their habitus, their medium, their swimming, etc., in order not to fall from Charybdis onto Scylla … 38
The point was that there were a host of different kinds of affinities presented by nature, and the job of the classifier was to do as little violence as possible as he sorted things into classes. The virtue of a great naturalist was the judgment with which he deployed the brute rules of his method. Whether whales were fish was, in this critical period in the history of classification, emphatically not a problem of facts; it was a problem of weighing the relevance of different facts to taxonomic order. In keeping the cetes with the fish in all his early work, Linnaeus opted for a general view of the animals in their totality. There was a personal dimension, too: in doing so, Linneaus preserved the ichthyological ordering of his dearest friend, his Uppsala schoolmate and natural-historical interlocutor, Petrus Artedi, whose fish classifications, published posthumously with Linnaeus’s help as Ichtyologia sive Opera Omnia de Piscibus (1738), were the only leavings of a life cut mysteriously short in a drowning accident in 1735.39
It appears that the first naturalist to pull the cetaceans out of the fish category was the French zoologist Jacques Brisson, in his 1756 work, Le Règne Animal Divisé en IX Classes, which did not, however, go so far as to sort them with the quadrupeds, but instead placed them in their own class at the same rank, and made them the second of his nine major divisions of the animal world. When Linnaeus, in his tenth edition of 1758, declared that the cetaceans had to be detached from the fish and added to the mammals, “by good right and just title, according to the law of nature,” Brisson complained that Linnaeus had gone too far along a path that Brisson himself had originally staked out. Indeed, he suggested that Linnaeus had only adopted such an exaggerated position (cetaceans-as-quadrupeds) so as to head off any allegation that he had plagiarized the central innovation (cetaceans-as-non-fish) from Le Règne Animal Divisé en IX Classes; Brisson, of course, believed the crafty Swede had done just that.40
That many systematic taxonomists gradually moved whales and dolphins out of the category of “fish” and into the category of “mammals” in the later eighteenth century was due in large part to the long shadow cast across natural history by the tenth edition of the Systema Naturae in those years. Hence, figures like Blumenbach and Camper ratified the move, and as Linnaeus’s system was revised and disseminated by Gmelin and others, the non-fish whale grew to be an increasingly common feature of the naturalist’s world. By 1789, when the Abbé Bonnaterre published the stand-alone quarto volume entitled Cétologie, the point of departure for the book would be a heated rejection of the position that whales were fish.41 And about the same time (across the channel), the celebrated anatomist John Hunter—who had personally dissected a dozen cetaceans (mostly smaller ones), and who had engaged a surgeon on an English whaling vessel to collect specimens—could dismiss the question in his monograph on whales, announcing: “This order of animals has nothing peculiar to fish, except living in the same element, and being endowed with the same powers of progressive motion as those fish that are intended to move with a considerable velocity.”42
But the very impatience of these assertions signals the durability of a contrary view (less well remembered in histories of classification), which survived above all among the followers of Buffon, for whom the Linnaean preoccupation with sorting natural productions into tidy boxes betrayed an overly simplistic view of the plural, plastic, and saturated character of nature. So, for instance, Duhamel du Monceau could, in 1782, include a discussion of the “cetaceous fishes” in the second part of his Traité des Pêches, and in 1792 (more than thirty years after Linnaeus’s tenth edition) Vicq d’Azyr continued to follow Brisson in keeping mammals and cetaceans as separate classes at the same taxonomic rank. Buffon’s aging collaborator Daubenton maintained the “viviparous quadrupeds” and the “cetaceans” as distinct classes as late as 1796, and even Lacépède—who spanned the era from Buffon to Cuvier at the veritable Mecca of global natural history, the Paris Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, and who authored the major two-volume treatise Histoire Naturelle des Cétacées in 1803—felt obliged, in 1799, to distinguish “the quadrupeds properly understood …, from those animals that nature has, in reality, set aside by form, and even more so by habits, in such a way as to place them closer to birds and fish.” The reference is to (fish-like) whales on the one hand, and to another problematic “edge” of the category of mammals, the (bird-like) bats, on the other.43
Cuvier’s commitment to building a taxonomic system that privileged, above all, the differentia of comparative anatomy led him to class both whales and bats firmly within the Mammalia, and in his 1797 Tableau Elémentaire—a text, recall, that Mitchill kept to hand—Cuvier defended that arrangement. At the same time, he there demurred on following Linnaeus concerning a third perennially problematic “mammal”—man. In 1797 Cuvier continued to treat human beings as a distinct taxon, not appropriately positioned within the mammifères; only later would the kingmaker of French science countenance a mammalian humanity. Mitchill would have learned of Cuvier’s changed position on this contentious matter by the early years of the nineteenth century from Duméril’s 1806 Zoologie Analytique, but it would not have shocked him, since Mitchill was already very familiar with Gmelin’s edition of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, which placed men and women firmly within the category of the “sucklers.” Mitchill’s own lectures in natural history in fact stayed closer to the Linnaean arrangement, presenting seven orders of Mammalia: from “Cetae” through “Primates—including man.” It was in this sense that Mitchill could say—and mean, from the perspective of the taxonomy he taught—that “a whale is no more a fish than a man.” The lawyers for the plaintiff would attack the “new philosophy” at this seam.
What, then, did Mitchill himself really know about whales in 1818? His books clearly indicated that the “new zoology” coming out of Paris embedded these creatures firmly in the category of the mammals, buttressing Linnaeus’s final wishes, but Mitchill also understood perfectly well that this was a relatively recent, and not uncontested, position. For instance, returning to the list of reference works Mitchill used in writing his “Fishes of New-York” we discover that, of the four major treatises he had to hand, two kept some or all whales in the fish category: Laurentius Theodorus Gronovius, whose father had been Linnaeus’s patron, followed the earlier editions of the Systema Naturae by placing all the “Plagiures” under “Pisces”; Marcus Elieser Bloch was dead by the time René Castel prepared (under Bloch’s name) the ten-volume 1809 Paris edition of the Histoire Naturelle des Poissons, and therefore was not in a position to object—as he might well have done—to Castel’s decision to treat whales there as fish.44 In fact, Castel even went so far as to refer to the front fins on a cetacean as its “nageoires branchiales”—i.e., its gill-fins!45 What Castel’s volumes demonstrate is that authors and editors publishing market-oriented natural history about fish in this era had a hard time letting go of the whales: putting aside anatomy and physiology, these creatures were, in a way, the best part of the whole enterprise; and, anyway, most book-buyers expected to see them covered. Who wanted to disappoint the customer?
But the issue reached deeper than that: if Mitchill happened to use Wailly’s French dictionary to help him through Histoire Naturelle des Poissons (it was a standard French vocabulary and grammar, easily available in New York City), he would have discovered the word “Cétacée” glossed as follows—“Said of large fish”!46 Now it is true that Mitchill’s copy of Shaw’s multivolume Zoology declared unequivocally that “the Cetaceous Animals, or Whales, however nearly approximated to Fishes by external form, and residence in the waters, are in reality to be considered as aquatic Mammalia.” Yet the same text did subtitle the whole order “Fish-formed Mammalia,” and acknowledged that “so strongly is the vulgar or popular idea respecting these animals impressed on the mind, that to this hour they are considered as Fishes by the mass of mankind.”47 Even in his revised second edition of the Règne Animal, published as late as 1829, Cuvier could still refer to whales as “the ‘hot-blooded fish’ of the ancients,” and he himself continued to use the outdated term “quadrupède” liberally through the 1820s.48
But Mitchill had other, less bookish, ways of learning about whales and dolphins too. As we have seen, he took students to the natural history cabinets of the city to pontificate about ocean fauna, and presented impromptu lectures on cetology while standing under the jaws of a baleen whale on Broadway. Moreover, where whales were concerned Mitchill did not fail to deploy his vaunted program for an inquisitive, collaborative, practical, and circulatory natural history. Mitchill was forever haunting the fish markets for natural-historical intelligence, some of which, he hoped, would have broader commercial value; these forays brought him into contact with whalemen, and others who preoccupied themselves with the cetes. For instance, as early as 1792 Mitchill corresponded with the Albany-based “Society for the Promotion of Useful Arts” concerning a method for catching porpoises that was used in New York waters, and he also detailed the process for tanning their skins into a workable leather.49 Given Mitchill’s expertise in fish and fisheries, his political activity, episodes of residence in Washington, and friendship with Thomas Jefferson, he was surely familiar with the exhaustive study on the cod and whale fisheries commissioned by Jefferson as Secretary of State and presented to the House of Representatives in 1791.50 This document underlined the function of the whaling and fishing industries as schools for seamen, and as peacetime reservoirs for naval service, and went on to make a number of recommendations for how whalers and codfishermen might benefit from protective tariffs and other government measures. Mitchill’s marriage into a shipbuilding fortune in 1799 increased his interests in maritime matters. He turned his attention to the causes of scurvy and to shipboard hygiene, and studied fish and fisheries with still greater focus.51 He circumnavigated Long Island as part of his self-appointed mission of resource assessment, and promoted the consumption of fish, turtles, and even sea-elephant tongue, which he served to an early meeting of the Lyceum of Natural History. This oddment gives choice evidence of his links to the New England boats that were prosecuting the hunt for “elephant oil” at the remote south Atlantic ice limits in these years.52 Sealers and whalemen were thus among his most important and far-flung informants, and in discussing the prolific Clupea menhaden in his “Fishes of New-York” (menhaden were a common baitfish in local waters), Mitchill reported his conversations with whalers, who had informed him that “on cutting up whales after death, great quantities of Menhaden had been discovered … in the stomach and intestine.”53 In fact, it appears that he went so far as to solicit from one of these old whalemen, Captain Valentine Barnard (from Hudson, New York), a pair of whale drawings: a sperm and a right [Plates 6 and 7].54
A review of the Minutes of the Lyceum of Natural History for the period leading up to the trial reveals that Mitchill and his fellow naturalists found themselves engaging cetological matters with some regularity.55 In October of 1818, Mitchill conveyed to the cabinet “the jaws of the Delphinus phocaena or porpoise” sent to him by a New York shipping agent who worked out of South American ports, as well as the “fetus of a porpoise from the East Indies” sent along by another correspondent.56 In the same year Mitchill would present a report on ambergris, “strongly corroborating the opinion that ambergrisse is nothing more than the indurated faeces of the Physter macrocephalus or sperm whale, and that it is never found in the healthy animal.”57
Sperm whales were a topic of particular interest in 1818 at the Lyceum. In that year a committee was formed, consisting of four of the most expert zoologists in the group, to investigate a mysterious specimen sent to the society for identification: a giant tooth, thought to come from a “marine animal.”58 Such a specimen merited particularly close attention in early 1818, when the whole of the Atlantic coast was in the throes of the notorious 1817–1819 Gloucester sea serpent craze. Chandos Michael Brown has reconstructed the national and international reverberations set off by the “sightings” of an unusual sea creature gamboling in the waters near Cape Ann, Massachusetts in these years, and has examined the way that the authority of both lay witnesses and ostensible “experts” was challenged in the process of parsing fact from fiction in these incidents.59 Mitchill and the Lyceum were swept up in the furor, and Mitchill himself deployed both his classical and his ichthyological erudition in an effort to contribute to a resolution. Shortly after the first reports hit New York, Mitchill read to the Lyceum a translation from the parts of Aldrovandi’s work on fish (presumably the De Piscibus of 1613) “in which he describes several species of marine serpents,” and Mitchill would later “debunk” a specimen brought forward as a sample of the creature’s skin.60
While the committee assigned to work on the tooth returned that it was found to be the tooth of a “spermaceti whale,” this was not wholly irrelevant to the pressing public mystery of the sea serpent, since sperm whales were known to feed on very large “sepia” or squid, and one of the favored explanations for the Gloucester creature among naturalists (including Mitchill) was that it was just such a giant “kraken.” Mitchill published several reports related to “the existence of the Kraken in the ocean” in 1817, including correspondence from eyewitnesses (invariably ship captains).61 This was a continuation of Mitchill’s interest in large and mysterious sea creatures, an interest predating the Gloucester sightings, and that had resulted in a lecture published in 1814 in the Medical Repository entitled “Facts and Observations Showing the Existence of Large Animals in the Ocean, Different in Their Shapes and Manners from Whales, and Frequently Exceeding Whales in Magnitude,” an essay accompanied by an illustration purporting to depict, to scale, a “(supposed) sepia octopus” [Figure 3].62
Mitchill thus had a recognized reputation as a seeker after the monsters of the deep, and after monstrosity in general, both by sea and by land: one of the first undertakings of the new Lyceum was to raise funds for the exhumation of a mammoth skeleton that had come to light in the loamy wet soil of an upstate farm. For Mitchill such a specimen would not only put another arrow in the quiver of all American naturalists who wished to lay to rest Buffon’s lingering disparagement of the vigor of New World nature; it would also put New York on the map as a site for natural wonders by breaking Peale’s monopoly on the monster, and, at the same time, it would let Mitchill enter more fully into debates about organic and terrestrial change in the region. It is also likely that Mitchill knew of the hypothesis put forward by Governor Thomas Pownall that the mammoth had been, in fact, a marine animal, and that “there are parts in the debris of the skull which have some comparative resemblance to the whale as to the purpose of breathing under water.”63
Surely part of the public fascination with the trial of Maurice v. Judd can be linked to the timely broader interest in mysterious creatures of the sea occasioned by the Gloucester craze and the murmurs swirling around the recent excavations of giant bones—possibly marine—by naturalist-collectors in Philadelphia and New York. Mitchill’s expertise in such matters was yet another qualification recommending his testimony. And at the same time, the perilous domains of mystery and monstrosity would afford another weak point in the edifice of classification, a weak point skillfully exploited by the opposing counsel.
TAXONOMY AT THE BAR
After invoking the distributed natural-historical expertise of maritime New York, and then hazarding a novel natural-historical interpretation of Genesis, Samuel Latham Mitchill moved to the heart of his scientific expertise, and confronted the court with a version of his Cetae lecture from the College of Physicians and Surgeons: whales are not fish because they breathe air, have no gills, give live birth, and have horizontal tails. On these last points the piscatorial exceptions (dogfish, blennies, flounder) could be explained away by more thorough and refined familiarity with the animal world. Having thus sketched the classificatory boundary lines, Mitchill began to press deeper, asking his listeners to delve into the interior of the organisms, and deploy the techniques of proper comparative anatomy:
The next distinguishing character is a vital mark; it is the structure of the heart: fish have but one ventricle and one auricle; but the cetaceous tribe have the heart double, like men and quadrupeds, and, as a consequence of this, alternate respiration.64
Other elements of the hidden internal anatomy were equally instructive: whales had a liver like that of a bullock, the doctor explained; unlike fish livers, the hepatic tissue of the cetes, exposed to air, rotted, and did not melt away into a usable oil.
William Sampson, probing for the cracks in Mitchill’s testimony, tried to draw him onto the matter of the similarity of external form between the fish and the whales by noting that “Fins … are common to them both,” but Mitchill used the scalpel of a comparative anatomist to ward off the suggestion, explaining that under the skin the “fins of the whale are of a peculiar structure,” more like hands and arms. Sampson played for the laugh, while displaying that he had done his anatomical homework:
Q: If, then, they are provided with hands and arms, it is natural to expect fingers and thumbs. How is it as to carpus, metacarpus, and phalanges; are they present; if so, could they use them for ordinary purposes, as to thread a needle, or do this? (taking a pinch of snuff.)65
To which Mitchill replied that “these extremities were covered with a membrane or web.” Sampson, a skilled orator and a lawyer with a fearsome reputation in cross-examination, would not let up: “Like people that wear mittens. No wonder they are awkward, and all their fingers like thumbs, as the saying goes.”66
Such banter only set the stage, however, for Sampson’s more elaborate attack on the value of taxonomic testimony. Putting aside a contest over anatomical facts (a tournament he was sure to lose), Sampson unfolded a two-pronged attack on Mitchill and the classificatory enterprise that he had come to court both to represent and to justify. In the first place Sampson—who was himself a member, like Anthon, of both the Literary and Philosophical Society and the Historical Society, and who was thereby in a position to marshal the societies’ libraries of learned texts in the service of his advocacy—took Mitchill through the history of natural classification, emphasizing at every turn that dissent, discord, and change had long characterized the enterprise. Along the way Sampson also sifted out the continued existence of the Buffonian tradition which had never abandoned the category of the “quadrupeds” and which had never accepted the whales within that category. Here Sampson and Anthon were, in a way, borrowing a page from Mitchill’s own book: as I have shown, Mitchill went to great lengths in his lectures and writing to emphasize that natural history was a dynamic enterprise in which dissent and argument were essential; Anthon, as it happened, had actually been Mitchill’s student, and was himself a member of the Lyceum of Natural History. Coming in this way, from the inside, an attack that exposed the divided, contentious, even fickle nature of classification could be very damaging to the authority of Mitchill’s scientific testimony.
Sampson’s second line of attack was one that pointed to implications: If the “modern naturalists” (as both he and Mitchill called them) were offering a novel account of natural order, what did this mean for the place of human beings in nature? Were these new systems “better” than the old ones? And not merely “better” at sorting various creepy-crawlies. As Sampson would intone in his closing arguments:
I think the onus lies on the advocates of this new philosophy to show to what good it tends. If it be to elevate the brutes, it is well contrived; but if it is for the benefit of the human kind, let them show what its virtue is. If it makes us better, happier, or wiser, diminishes our toils, lessens our sorrows, or exalts our hopes, it is worthy of our gratitude and praise.67
This was a tall order for Cuvier, Lamarck, and Linnaeus, but these were questions that a democratic community might ask of its philosophers, particularly when the foundations of scripture and plain language were being catacombed by men seemingly obsessed with bones and bowels.
Both prongs of Sampson’s attack—classification as a chaos, and the dangerous implications of the new philosophies of taxonomy—went after the cultural authority of the sciences in general and natural history in particular: at stake was not merely a few barrels of oil, or an ambiguously worded statute; at stake, in the end, was the proper place of science and men of science in the Republic, and, by implication, the civic function and standing of the three-story building just outside the courtroom, the New-York Institution of Learned and Scientific Establishments, so recently elevated as the city’s distinguished Academy to stand significantly beside its new marble Acropolis.
Sampson’s first line of questioning, then, worked to recover the long history of classification, and to excavate lost authorities in zoology, with an eye toward revealing that taxonomy was in fact a farrago of conflicting opinions. Take, for instance, the following exchange:
COUNSEL: Have you present in your recollection, Doctor, the ninth book of Pliny’s Historia Mundi …
WITNESS: I have looked into Pliny, but I cannot trust to my memory.
COUNSEL: Does it not appear from the writings of Pliny, that he knew the nature of the whales as well as the philosophers of this day?
WITNESS: I do not think he did.
COUNSEL: As to its mode of breathing and organs of respiration? WITNESS: I think anybody might know that.
COUNSEL: Yet neither he nor Aristotle, nor any of the ancients, ever inferred from thence that the whale was not a fish.
To which Mitchill replied dismissively, “Very possibly, they were not so fully informed.”
But was this high-handedness warranted? Sampson thought not: “I do not find that the modern philosophers agree as respects the system of Linnaeus; almost every one rejects some part, and substitutes or adds something of his own.” A contention Mitchill answered glibly, in a manner not calculated to maintain the distinguished and aloof authority of zoologists: “They are, then, the more like lawyers, if they do not agree.”68
This, of course, was precisely Sampson’s point, and to make it palpable to the jury he led Mitchill through a painstaking recitation of the primary taxonomic divisions made by Aristotle (with and without blood), Pliny (Homo, Terrestria, Aquatilia, and Insecta), and finally Linnaeus himself, who, Mitchill declared, “first understood classification.”69 And though Mitchill complained in exasperation, “I must now appeal to the court, whether I am to be catechised and questioned like a college candidate,” the judge gave Sampson the ground, explaining that “though a witness of superior learning or skill is called upon to speak as to matters of opinion, the other party is permitted to inquire into the grounds of that opinion.”
Mitchill was thus obliged to nod as Sampson rehearsed Linnaeus’s classes (Mammalia, Aves, Pisces, Amphibia, Insecta, and Vermes), then opened the mammals out into Linnaeus’s seven orders (Primates, Bruta, Ferae, Glires, Pecora, Belluae, and Cetae), and finally laid the groundwork for his closing arguments by unfolding the Primates into Linnaeus’s four genera (“homo, simia, lemur, and vespertillo; that is, man, monkey, macauco, and bat”). After Mitchill had affirmed these groupings as properly Linnaean, Sampson could begin to push on the larger implications of this taxonomy: “Now, is not man strangely mated or matched, when the whale and the porpoise are his second cousins, and the monkey and the bat his germans? Other gentlemen may choose their company, I am determined to cut the connection.”
Leaving that looming question hanging, Sampson then turned to a skillful unraveling of the whole Linnaean enterprise, focusing on the monstrosity much in everyone’s mind in the years of the Gloucester craze: the giant squid. Citing Mitchill’s own writings on the kraken, Sampson sought further systematic guidance on these mysterious creatures:
If I have not forgot what I once read in your Medical Repository touching this animal, it amounts to this: That in the first six editions of Linnaeus’s systema naturae, it was placed amongst the mollusca, till Bomare and Banks rejected it altogether as fabulous. That Ulisses Aldrovandus and Ambrosinus, were, if I recollect your very phrase, awed to silence, but that Mumfort came forward with proofs of its existence.
And when Mitchill confirmed this account, Sampson laid a trap of a question:
The only thing I shall now request from your indulgence, is to know to what class, order, and genus, this prodigious creature properly belongs, according to the modern classification; if it be the same that Pliny described as being four acres in extent, quaternum jugerum, and is the same as the kraken, which is said to be a cuttle fish, and which Linnaeus classes with the worms, vermes.
Mitchill then demurred, explaining that the giant animal was nothing other than a very large instance of the “little fish [sic!] that comes to our market, called the squid.”70 But Sampson pushed the point: would Linnaeus ask that this mysterious and terrifying animal, larger than a whale, be classified with the garden worm? And was it not the case that at different times this same creature had been classified not only with the worms, but with the “oysters,” and later still with the “crustacea,” which would “necessarily associate it with the lobster, the scorpion, the pediculus or louse, and likewise with the flea”? Was it possible that modern zoologists had considered classing a sea creature with tentacles the size of a ship’s mast in the very same order with infinitesimal black hoppers such as might be found on a common dog?
At this point the order in the court degenerated, since a number of spectators had been “seized with an impulse of laughter” at these incongruous groupings, and at Sampson’s deft and theatrical assault on taxonomic pretense. Infuriated, the defendant’s counsel (who had put Mitchill on the stand) rose to object, pleading with the judge to cut off “this mode of examining a witness of Doctor Mitchill’s high standing and dignity of character.” And out of this tumult, Mitchill offered a reply, not on the systematic standing of the sepia, but on the very idea of scientific progress. His peroration was abstracted by the shorthander:
The witness then observed … that … generally speaking, the latest works of science were the best, as embodying the information of all predecessors, and leading to a correct summary of all prior information; and he that would at this day trust to the classical authors on zoology would do as one who, pursuing the longitude, would trust to Kepler, and the mathematicians that preceded Lord Napier.71
In high dudgeon, defending the onerous labors and considerable accomplishments of modern zoology, Mitchill continued:
The difficulties of classification are great, requiring judgement, research, patience, and acumen. The necessities and difficulties are alike known to scientific men, and these difficulties are not aided by obscure references to the obsolete and antiquated doctrines…. The labors of necessary classification are to be painfully pursued and lead to infinite, and sometimes to microscopic researches, even amongst insects filthy to the touch, and disgusting to the sense.
But the hard-won results were among the crowning accomplishments of mankind:
Without methodical classification, and appropriate nomenclature, the study of the vast variety of nature’s productions would be barren and impracticable. The great Linnaeus knew this, and, like a second creator, brought order out of chaos. His system is not perfect, neither can it be said to have been abolished, any more than the altering [of] this hall by shifting the benches, or changing the doors would be the destruction of the fabric.
And with that rousing declaration, Mitchill took his leave.
The issues that had been raised, however, would not go away. Seeking further to undermine both the defense’s most illustrious witness and the strongest part of their case, Sampson assembled a stack of books on the plaintiff’s side table, and the second day of the trial opened with Sampson’s reading into the record the full weight of taxonomic authority that stood against the zoological line that ran from Linnaeus through Cuvier and Lamarck up to Mitchill. What Sampson had uncovered, reading in the library of the New York Hospital in the days before the trial (and in mining the relevant entries in several multivolume encyclopedias—particularly the essay on “Cetology” in the New Edinburgh Encyclopedia), was the durability of that Buffonian classificatory tradition, a tradition that expressed its anti-Linnaean bias through an entrenched opposition to “artificial” groupings. In the end, this tradition saw essentially all groupings as more or less the work of men, not nature.72
Citing the sentiments of “that great master genius,” Buffon, whose work was “known to everyone” (via translations of the Histoire Naturelle), Sampson warned the jury that there were celebrated students of the natural world who had long protested against “the evils of burdensome nomenclatures, and tiresome minutiae.” Within this Buffonian tradition, the Mosaical orderings were, after a fashion, preserved, and, to show as much, Sampson cited a number of English-language works in natural history all of which eschewed mammary-oriented neologisms, retained the older category of the “quadrupeds,” and kept the cetaceans out of association with their terrestrial betters—for instance, Thomas Pennant’s 1781 History of Quadrupeds.
This popular work (which ran quickly through multiple editions), by a fellow of the Royal Society who himself had an interest in cetacean anatomy, opened with the very sort of anti-Linnaean peroration from which Sampson cribbed his closing arguments: Pennant acknowledged his respect for the great Swede, but complained that the constantly changing editions had made the Systema Naturae difficult to defend as a “system”; worse still, the category of the Mammalia was, for Pennant, impossible to recommend, and he wrote that the faults in this class “oblige me to separate myself, in this one instance, from his crowd of votaries.”73 The cetaceans—along, again, with man (“my vanity will not suffer me to rank mankind with apes, monkeys, maucaucos and bats”)—were the rub:
The last order is that of whales: which it must be confessed, have, in many respects, the structure of land animals; but their want of hair and feet, their fish-like form, and their constant residence in the water, are arguments for separating them from this class, and forming them into another, independent of the rest.74
Pennant was, in a way, recovering the taxonomic value of the older grouping of four-footed beasts (“quadru-peds”) exactly to defend against those three unseemly “edges” of the territory Linnaeus had defined as the Mammalia: whales, human beings, and bats. The Buffonian preference for what we would now call “family resemblance” categories—the “dog-like animals,” “the cow-like animals”—was a powerful resort for a classifier who had watched the Linnaean system move further and further from “common sense” in the familiar realm of the beasts. And one could hold this view even while admitting that the author of the Systema Naturae had done extraordinary things sorting plants and the lower animals, where his achievement was nothing less (as Pennant put it) than to have “given philosophy a new language.” Where the big critters were concerned, however, Pennant cast his lot with Linnaeus’s archrival (though not without acknowledging some misgivings about Buffon’s thoroughgoing unwillingness to “shackle his lively spirit with systematic arrangement”). How intimately was Pennant tangled up with the great French naturalist? So much so that the whole of Pennant’s History of Quadrupeds was originally conceived as “an index to Buffon.”
Pennant was by no means alone. Buffon had been blessed with a gaggle of English-language naturalists who busily redacted his work in the period, most prominently Oliver Goldsmith, whose 1774 rewrite of the original Histoire Naturelle into a piece of inspired hackwork (A History of the Earth and Animated Nature) achieved irrepressible popularity.75 More than twenty nineteenth-century editions and digests of this multivolume work can be traced, testimony to the prescience of James Boswell, who commented that Goldsmith would make natural history “as entertaining as a Persian Tale.”76 Thanks to the source criticism of James Hall Pitman we have a very clear sense of how Goldsmith cut and pasted from Buffon, stringing these excerpts together with pleasing anecdotes and amusing aperçus in an effort to compose a work indifferent to the pretensions of zoological “science,” but concerned instead to mobilize natural-historical knowledge in the service of pleasurable reading: here was the “book of nature” as leisure, not labor. As Goldsmith himself put it: “my chief ambition is to grab up the obscure and gloomy learning of the cell to open inspection; to strip it from its garb of austerity, and to show the beauties of that form, which only the industrious and the inquisitive have been permitted to approach.”77
Both sides in Maurice v. Judd had access to the 1816 London edition of this work (a six-volume version expanded by W. Turton, a Fellow of the Linnaean Society), and both read excerpts from it into the record of the trial. For Sampson, Anthon, and the plaintiff, Goldsmith was a valuable ally, since his popularity made him a familiar reference for many in the court, and his Buffonian natural history meant that Animated Nature had no patience for tedious anatomical details or counterintuitive groupings based on disgusting or louche features. Where the fishes were concerned, Goldsmith followed the classic formulation of Willughby and Ray, identifying three primary classes—cetaceous, cartilaginous, and spinous (or bony)—and did so with full knowledge of the urgings of the modern anatomists, which occasioned merely an aside on the limited value of comparative anatomy for classification:
A different formation of the lungs, stomach, and intestines, a different manner of breathing or propagating, are not sufficient to counterbalance the great obvious analogy which these animals bear to the whole finny tribe. They are shaped as other fishes; they swim with fins; they are entirely naked, without hair; they live in the water, though they come up to breathe; they are only seen in the depths of the ocean, and never come upon shore but when forced thither. These sure are sufficient to plead in favour of the general denomination, and acquit mankind of error in ranking them with their lower companions of the deep.78
Goldsmith, like any good populist, cast his lot with the folk.
In addition to citing Pennant and Goldsmith, Sampson also brought forward as evidence slighter texts which were little more than dilapidations of these higher exercises in English book-trade natural history, works like John Bigland’s epistolary rendering (or, more properly, piracy) of Goldsmith, which, under the title Letters on Natural History (companion volume to the Letters on Universal History), assembled sixty-two didactic missives on nature “calculated particularly for the use of schools and young persons in general of both sexes; in order to impress their minds with a just idea of its great author.”79 Bigland too, predictably, placed the whale at the head of the sea creatures, and informed his reader-penpal that this “enormous fish” must be “regarded as one of the greatest curiosities of animated nature; and if its commercial importance be justly appreciated, it will be esteemed an object worthy of the attention and examination both of the naturalist, the politician, and the merchant.”80
Calling on these texts, Sampson proved to the jury that there was a durable, indeed prolific, body of natural history literature that held Linnaean categories at bay, and that preserved whales as the kings of the fish. By doing so Sampson succeeded in turning Mitchill’s vision of a vigorous, intellectually dynamic world of natural-historical disputation against itself. Moreover, Sampson pursued this subversive attack along several vulnerable avenues. Not only did taxonomists disagree about where whales belonged in the order of nature, but also (and worse) the whole enterprise of natural history was, Sampson asserted, riven by internal contradiction: drawing on an established anti-Linnaean argument, this skilled debater set about undermining the whole contemporary project of classification by setting its preoccupation with novelty against its pretensions to discover immutable hierarchies. It was, he pointed out, emphatically the joy of the modern zoologists to proffer novel and heretofore undiscovered creatures at every turn: krakens and mammoths, duck-billed beavers and kangaroos. Given then that many new animals were constantly being added to the pantheon of natural history, how could any taxonomic system—of necessity based on an incomplete sample—pretend to have seized on the proper classifications for everything? Here Sampson was rehearsing a well-worn objection raised (by Buffon and others) against Linnaean-style rubrics for sorting the plenum into the nesting trays of some vast and idealized cabinet. Of the perennial flood of novel animals Sampson asked: “had they been known,” might they not have served as “connecting links, and prevented such grotesque associations and abrupt transitions,” and might they not have helped avoid the “forced and incongruous grouping of animals every way dissimilar, in the same order; as in the order ferae, or wild beasts, the lion, the seal, the hedgehog and the mole”?81 And if taxonomic systems were designed in such a way as to be always ready to admit of the novelty that natural historians so prized, then would not each system have to become a perpetual pageant of rearrangement? As Sampson put it, “the ranks must open to receive them as they respectively arrive, and the order of the parade be still changing.”82 How could the jury repose its confidence in an enterprise so at the mercy of whim and circumstance?
Indeed, in his closing arguments, Sampson stressed exactly this problem—the heterogeneity of zoological orderings—the issue with which he had battered Mitchill on the stand. Referring the court to the very long article on “Classification” in the American edition of Rees’s Cyclopedia (a monograph-length entry that ran to several hundred pages and extended over two volumes in a work that Mitchill himself had cited, praised, and patronized), Sampson pointed out that those who would overturn Linnaeus were not some wayward rump of radicals, since after all “Linnaeus had overturned the systems of Artedi and his predecessors,” and moreover “the names of the sectarians who have since founded other systems, or new modelled [sic] his, would fill a catalogue.”83 Equipped with further evidence that the history of classification was a hurly-burly and a perpetual game of king of the hill, Sampson asked the jury how anyone could possibly begin to find his way among the competing claimants. Pressing the point in a trenchant rhetorical overture, Sampson asked if there would be any end to the arcane and fantastical ratiocination of the modern systematists:
And what virtue is there in the scalpel of the anatomist, or in his blow-pipe, that he should have the sole privilege of new-creating, and nicknaming God’s creatures? Why may not the school of Boerhaave found a system of zoology upon the elementa medicinae physico mathematicae, and class according to the animal functions, explained by mechanical causes and mathematical demonstrations? [¶] The craniologist, craniosophist, cranionomist, or craniogonist, after Gall and Spurzheim, may by the nervous streaks on the ganglion of the brain, and their circumvolutions on the hemispheres, and the protrusions by the organs of the mental faculties of the parallel lamina of the skull … class and arrange all things.84
And, reflecting a familiarity with the anthropometry that was already an essential element of the classification of the human races, Sampson raised specters still more extravagant and troubling:
The geometricians will have pantometrical zoology, classing by points, lines, surfaces, and solids, the genders of curves, ratios of affections, motions, and positions. There will be the straight, crooked, and perpendicular families, the equilateral, curvilateral, and multicrural: The cycloid, trapezoid, and rhomboid orders, so that by comparing the angle of the bee’s knee with the inclination of the cat’s tail, there will be no danger of mistake. And with the aid of a Gunter’s scale, a logarithmic table, and a theodolite, you may distinguish a maiden from a bat. 85
This biting satire nibbled its way to the crux of the matter: the implications—for human beings—of the new taxonomies. It was here that the plaintiff’s side saw their best hope for undermining not only Mitchill but the whole edifice of modern zoological classification.
Zeroing in on the Linnaean category of the Primates, Sampson linked the fate of mammalian whales to that of primate men and women, reminding the jury that if they accepted Mitchill’s testimony on the cetes, they were obliged to accept as well a humble place for themselves in the order of nature: “Yes, gentlemen of the jury, in the same order with man, they place the monkey, ape, and baboon; all equally related, and differing from the lord of the creation only as they differ from each other.”86 And, Sampson suggested, the Linnaean differentia were hardly comforting:
But now, the rule is this, and if you follow it, you will be quite safe. A man is an ape minus two thumbs, and a baboon minus two thumbs and a tail. And e converso, a baboon is a man plus two thumbs and a tail, and a monkey is a man plus two thumbs; or thus, a man with an extra pair of thumbs would be an ape, and with those, and the addition of a tail, would be a baboon. If I had not known this to be philosophy, I should have supposed it was the black art. It is enough to give bad dreams.
Conveniently, Sampson’s co-counsel, John Anthon, was there to conjure up those very dreams, darkening the nightmare with the bogies of race, civic disorder, and excessively universal franchise. Stirring up a witches’ brew of Mitchill’s modern taxonomy and entrenched American legal hierarchies, Anthon warned of what might lie ahead if the men of science were given license to interpret the statutes of the state. Reiterating that the implication of Mitchill’s analysis was that the monkey is, “in the language of naturalists, no more a brute, than a whale is a fish,” Anthon went on to ask how far Linnaean classification would be permitted to penetrate into the system of law:
We have a statute, which declares that every freeman shall be entitled to a vote at our public elections; let us suppose, then, that at some one of those arduous struggles, where everything in the shape of a man had been by the zeal of politicians urged to the hustings, that the learned Doctor had appeared, leading forward with all due gravity to the polls an orang outang, or man of the woods, would the stranger’s vote be received, although the Doctor should very learnedly and eloquently urge his claims, as he has done those of the whale on the present occasion? He breathes the vital air, the Doctor might say, through lungs; He moves erect, &c. has warm blood; the female brings forth her young alive, and rears the bantling at her breasts. The inspectors would say, in reply to all the eloquence and learning of the Doctor, as we do in the case of the whale, all this indeed is very strange and curious, but still, Doctor, it is a monkey in common acceptation, however naturalists may choose to hail and class him as a brother.87
No one in the Mayor’s Court would have missed the import of these high-stakes histrionics: In 1818 New York was in the throes of a contentious political and cultural transition; just a year earlier the legislature in Albany had passed the controversial emancipation statute of 1817, which set in motion a series of steps that promised freedom for all the slaves in the state by 1827. This move initiated a period of increasing White hostility toward African Americans in the city, as fears of labor competition and social mingling precipitated violent reaffirmations of racial supremacy. These developments made the dangerous issue of the free Black franchise—a source of sharp and long-standing disputes between the Democratic-Republican party (with its ties to the South) and the Federalists (with whom free Blacks were thought to vote)—more explosive than ever. It had been widely alleged that the three-hundred free Black voters of New York City had been responsible for the Federalist victory in the closely contested Assembly election of 1813, and wartime anger among anti-Federalists spilled over against the Black community in the years that followed. Various legal and illegal means were deployed to harass and intimidate potential Black voters in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and the specter of complete emancipation had given new urgency to the promoters of such practices after 1817.88
All of which is to say there was no doubt in the room that Anthon’s fear-mongering was intended to invoke the inflammatory matter of race and franchise in the city, tacitly playing on the pernicious and durable period rhetoric (and nascent race-science) that linked Africans to the lower primates (Anthon’s “hail him as a brother” mischievously echoed the familiar slogan of the abolitionists, “Am I not a man, and a brother?”).89 Line-drawing and category-defining were the central problems of the franchise in these years; would the (White) citizenry care to hand that fraught business over to a clique of didactic, self-important professors? Interestingly, while both Sampson and Mitchill were involved in manumission activities, they had recently squared off in another legal confrontation, one that brought questions of medicine and taxonomy directly to bear on the issue of race. Back in August of 1808, Sampson and Mitchill took center stage in the sensational case of The Commissioners of the Almshouse v. Alexander Whistelo, in which the African-American man Alexander Whistelo (a coachman in the service of the botanist David Hosack) challenged the allegation that he fathered the child of Lucy Williams, “a yellow woman”; he thus disavowed financial responsibility for her offspring.90 Sampson represented Whistelo in the case (which meant the Irish lawyer had a vested interest in nurturing the widespread rumors that the child was in fact Hosack’s). Medical testimony dominated the trial, which turned on the question of whether the child could plausibly have been Whistelo’s, given that “the said child was of quite a light color.”91 Mitchill (a close friend of Hosack’s, a fact not overlooked by the chatterers) was one of very few medical men to testify that it was, in his opinion, “a possibility, nay, a probability, that the said child has been begotten by the said Alexander Whistelo.”92 The case solicited medical and scientific witnesses to discuss the taxonomy of racial admixtures, and the physiology of child development among the different races. Anthropometrical techniques of racial discrimination were discussed in this case, which was apparently sufficiently well known among nineteenth-century students of law in New York (primarily for its bordello scene testimony) that the third volume of Wheeler’s Reports of Criminal Law Cases, where the transcripts originally appeared, proved very difficult to keep on law school shelves.93
From the outset, Samuel Latham Mitchill’s trip to the witness stand in the case of Maurice v. Judd promised to stage a very public showdown, a duel of wit and erudition, between the city’s leading naturalist-philosopher and a pair of its prominent attorneys. The occasion beckoned to the citizens of the metropolis in the leisurely days between Christmas and the New Year precisely because sparks were likely to fly when Sampson and Mitchill crossed their rhetorical blades in the Mayor’s Court, and rumors of Mitchill’s “paradox” ensured that the galleries were full when it came time for him to defend the learning of the French school in the teeth of common opinion. As we have seen, Mitchill worked to defend more than the taxonomic status of air-breathing marine creatures with horizontal tails: he tried to defend a vision of natural history that was collaborative and centripetal, that centered on the maritime city of New York, and that derived its intelligence from the expanding global orbits of Fredonian seamen. When flushed from this cover by the baying pack of democratic consensus (which howled that all sea creatures were, by definition, fish) Mitchill resorted to a pious exegesis of Genesis, and buttressed his natural history with a textually attentive natural theology well rooted in scripture. Only then, after allying himself with the intelligence of the Republic and a Mosaical zoology, did Mitchill rehearse the “principles of science” upon which the non-fish whale rested. As he put it to the court, according to these principles, “as now digested, perfectly understood, and past all question, the facts being all arranged and posted up to this day, and as far as human discoveries have gone, and human research penetrated, it is received as an incontestible [sic] fact in zoology, that a whale is no fish.”94
As Sampson drew Mitchill’s testimony firmly onto the terrain of modern taxonomy, he drew the doctor more deeply into a defense not merely of mammalian cetaceans, but of the very methods, results, and implications of contemporary natural history, calling into question the intestine preoccupations of comparative anatomy, the counterintuitive classifications of Linnaeus, Cuvier, and Lamarck, and the unsettling company that human beings were supposed to keep under these novel schemes. Along the way Sampson emphasized alternative taxonomies (like those of Buffon) that remained current and that rejected Mitchill’s groupings. Even more damaging, Sampson marshaled a great deal of evidence that the whole history of taxonomy was nothing other than a chaotic procession of dissent and discord, a litany of failed systems and self-aggrandizing systematizers each discarding the work of his predecessors. I have suggested that here, in an effort to undermine natural historical authority, Sampson (and Anthon) were successfully mobilizing Mitchill’s own depiction (in his teaching and writing) of natural history as a vigorous and dynamic enterprise, full of argument and dissent.
In this subversive and skeptical assault on the whole enterprise of natural history we garner a remarkably clear view of just how unsettled the domain of the classificatory sciences could look in a period that historians of science have tended to characterize as the triumphant age of taxonomy. A skilled and intelligent disputant, with access to a modest medical library, could scope out deep rifts in the program that Mitchill depicted as having achieved thoroughgoing consensus.95 By drawing on the collatitious and piratical domain of book-trade natural history, and sifting the volumes of encyclopedias like Rees’s and Brewster’s, Sampson was able to assemble compelling evidence that taxonomy was a fraught and fallible enterprise: the very possibility of a single, presiding, fixed scheme for arranging the productions of nature remained in question, and competing accounts could be seen to cancel each other out; novelty, monstrosity, and humanity all proved weak points in the schemes of those who would collect and sort all the creatures of the globe; the vaunted claim of the naturalists—that they had peeked into God’s own cabinet, and witnessed how He arranged His creations—could be made to sound like a terribly hollow boast. What remained after this assault was hardly a picture of human mastery over creation. Rather, here were the feeble offerings of those “who attempt to follow nature into the secret recesses where she loves to retire” and who thus “find themselves in a labyrinth to which they have no clue.” Hence, as Sampson continued,
those trembling lines, traced with a feeble hand; those limits which nature disavows, and boundaries which she disowns. Hence those ephemeral systems which efface each other, succeeding like the ocean’s waves, of which the inventor has only this benefit, that his errors are concealed under the protective cloud of mystical jargon.96
Nor was Sampson content to have undermined the authority of zoologists and classifiers. He dilated his argument into a broad assault on the pretensions and dangers of science more generally, and permitted the dominant metaphors for scientific progress to undo themselves: Linnaeus, Mitchill would have it, brought forth order like a “second creation”? Sampson answered that we would do better to “remain as we were before this second creation, for I do not think it becoming for the lords of creation to be ranked with porpoises and hogs.”97 Was it the case that more recent science universally excelled that of the past, since each generation stood on the shoulders of the last (as Mitchill had suggested)? Sampson parried: “so unsteady is the footing of those who stand upon each others [sic] shoulders, that I fear this cumulative series will not gain strength by numbers, and if the most learned are uppermost, there is danger of the column becoming top heavy. It was in this manner the giants tried to climb, but their pride got a fall, and I fear this new philosophical ladder will scarcely reach where Jacob’s did.”98 In his closing arguments Sampson would prove as much, since he would wrap himself (and his client) in scripture, showing that the English Bible used “great fish” to describe the creature that swallowed Jonah in the Old Testament, but that when the Gospel of Matthew alluded to the same event, the reader learned that the reluctant prophet had been “three days and three nights in the whale’s belly.”99 So much for Mitchill’s Mosaical-Genesical distinction between Pisces and Cetae.100
And just as science itself came under suspicion in Maurice v. Judd, the persona of the man of science—and his place in the Republic—also came under assault in the closing arguments of the case. Likening Mitchill to an Aristotle aggrandized by the despotic power of that “Alexander” known as “public opinion,” Sampson depicted the doctor as a fearsome force: “Who but one conscious of his terrible power would have planted himself in the attitude of proud defiance, like a castle on a cliff, and proclaimed in the face of a court and jury what he did, on that ever memorable moment, when he declared, upon the faith of modern zoologists, that a whale was no more a fish than a man? and that none but lawyers and politicians would now a days suppose it so?”101 Here was a man of learning who was quite nearly a corrupter of youth, and Sampson threatened that he might just have to take a walk across town and visit Mitchill’s lecture room, in order to inform his misguided acolytes that, pace their sophisticated opinions, the common law did indeed deem the whale very much a fish, and nothing whatsoever like a man. Centuries of legal tradition and case law buttressed the position. Again and again Sampson sounded the alarm at the “monstrosity” of the man of science loose in the court, and Sampson defended his rough handling of the esteemed witness by arguing that “the manner in which he has treated the law and the lawyers, considering his might and his weight, makes it as much self-defence, as it would be to turn an elephant out of your garden where he would trample everything under his feet.”102 Just as the whale was a strange sort of monster-hybrid—“from the midriff down it has no one of the character [sic] of man or quadruped, so that all the power of philosophy, with ‘oxen and wain-ropes’ to boot, can never get it more than half out of the water”—so, too, the Jeffersonian philosopher had about him something of the amphibian, “of the people” one moment, lecturing them the next, lording his erudition over them like a beast, and then vanishing into their bosoms.103 Indeed, Sampson likened his combat with Mitchill to the encounter with the ultimate amphibian of myth:
There was a demigod of old, a great icthyologist [sic], for he kept the flocks of Neptune. He knew almost every thing, and was consulted upon all great occasions, by the kings and people. He was Proteus, and could, if not disposed to answer categorically, use all shapes, shifts, and transitions. It was so with the learned witness in this cause; you saw that he eluded our inquiries; how he flew from the arctic to the antarctic circle; from Davis’s straights to the straights [sic] of Magellan; and like Puck, the fairy, put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes.104
And this depiction of the man of science as a protean, formless creature—a nondescript, a beast neither fish nor flesh—ran throughout the trial, reaching perhaps its most elegant formulation in Sampson’s cross-examination of Mitchill, when, in the course of questions about the amphibious nature of the manatee, Sampson drew Mitchill into an exchange about the great sea monster of classical antiquity, Oannes, “who daily came out of the Red Sea with a man’s head under his fish’s head, man’s legs under his fish’s tail, and man’s hands under his fins,” and who, according to the chroniclers, taught philosophy to the ancients. Sampson asked if Mitchill thought Oannes could have been, perhaps, a manatee, and if so, “how such a cetaceous person could teach astrology and icthyology [sic], or use letters” (yes, manatees were arguably cetaceans in this period—remember the “Plagiures”).105 Mitchill expressed his opinion that Oannes was merely an Indian philosopher who had fallen into the water upon disembarking from his ship in a Western port. To which Sampson replied that this ichthyform being was, then, most likely, “neither a demigod, as some say, nor a monster, as others would have it, but that the truth lay between, and that he was a philosopher,” like the witness himself.106
Later, Sampson would literalize the figure of the philosopher-monster, likening Mitchill to the very Leviathan he had come to anatomize, and mocking the awe of the court when Mitchill was first introduced as the star witness for the defense: what a moment that was, needled Sampson, “when the flag was first unfurled, and the trumpets flourished so loud, as who should say, here comes the great leviathan whom the arrow cannot make flee, the spear, the dart, nor the halbergeon; out of whose nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or a cauldron.” So great was this figure, so awful his stature on the stand, that Sampson suggested even the meekest questioning of this monster-sage, a mere “inquiring into the grounds of his opinions,” was received by all as a shocking, appalling affront—heedless and mad. Since the learning of this monster was held “omnipotent,” the opposing counsel had even tried to scold Sampson for his impudent cross-examination: “canst thou open the doors of his face, it was said, or words to that effect—Canst thou play with him as with a bird, or bind him for the maidens? who shall put a hook in his nose, or go to him with a double bridle?”107
As Sampson reached out, beyond oil, whales, and taxonomy, to make Maurice v. Judd turn on the authority of science itself, and the standing of natural philosophers in the Republic, he invoked the vision of a democratic agon in which philosophy would be forced to weather public scrutiny: “No man can have more respect and deference for learning than I have; but I am upon duty like a sentinel, bound to challenge every witness, and not to let King nor Kayser pass, till he advance the parol.”108 Here was an anti-authoritarian vision of science which Sampson expounded with democratic aplomb: “had certain opinions of Aristotle, before they became articles of faith, been brought to the test of common sense, and that great man had been called as a witness in the Heliana, or other Athenian courts, and had some Crito, Phocion, or Isocrates, used the privilege of cross examination, the schools would not have been occupied to our own times, with the unprofitable doctrines of form, privation, and matter, categories, sophisms, and syllogisms.”109 And, at the same time, it was, in a democratic court in the United States, the “common privilege of the counsel, the client, and the community,” not to be “spoon fed by doctors of medicine, with ill concocted Greek, such as Greek babies would spit out.”110
By the time Maurice v. Judd went to the jury, the three barrels of spermaceti had been lashed to the looming figure of the man of science. They would float or sink together.
1 Francis, Reminiscences of Samuel Latham Mitchill, p. 22.
2 See Alan David Aberbach, In Search of an American Identity: Samuel Latham Mitchill, Jeffersonian Nationalist (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), p. 5.
3 Mitchill has never been the subject of a full biographical study; insurmountable source problems probably preclude such a work (a fire destroyed the archive Mitchill himself had amassed to make such a book possible). My discussion of his life and work here has been informed by the manuscript collection of Mitchill’s letters from Washington in the period of his service in the House of Representatives (held in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress), in addition to Mitchill material in the New-York Historical Society, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the Columbiana Collection (held in the Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscript Library). There are also several Mitchill letters in the DeWitt Clinton Papers (also at Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscript Library) which I have consulted. Period biographical material, besides the several works of John W. Francis, includes: Mitchill’s own curriculum vitae, published as a pamphlet, Some of the Memorable Events and Occurrences in the Life of Samuel L. Mitchill of New-York, from the Year 1786 to 1826 (New York: n.p., 1828); and Felix Pascalis’s eloge, published as Eulogy on the Life and Character of the Hon. Samuel Latham Mitchill, M.D. (New York: American Argus Press, 1831). Note that the New York Public Library copy of the former, AN PV 78, contains a tipped-in supplement sheet that appears to be contemporary. Several secondary sources have been useful, including: Edgar Fahs Smith, Samuel Latham Mitchill: A Father in American Chemistry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1922); Hall, A Scientist in the Early Republic; and the recent work by Alan David Aberbach (which is mostly concerned with Mitchill’s political career and vision for the Republic, and which does little with his scientific activities), In Search of an American Identity.
4 Francis, Old New York, pp. 90–91.
5 The quote is from Hall, A Scientist in the Early Republic, p. 18. On Silliman, see Chandos Michael Brown, Benjamin Silliman: A Life in the Young Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). On Henry, see Albert E. Moyer, Joseph Henry: The Rise of an American Scientist (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1997); and Thomas Coulson, Joseph Henry: His Life and Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950). George H. Daniels discusses these figures, and the more general forces at work in the transition, in: “The Process of Professionalization in American Science: The Emergent Period, 1820–1860,” Isis 58, no. 2 (1967), pp. 150–166.
6 See the announcement in American Monthly Magazine and Critical Review 1 (1817), p. 121. The term “proto-professional” is used by Thomas Bender in reference to this group. “Research-oriented” is admittedly somewhat anachronistic, but defensible, I think, since Mitchill explicitly hoped that many of his students would eventually contribute to the production of knowledge about the country.
7 Mitchill to Clinton, 20 Feburary 1826, DeWitt Clinton Papers, Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscript Library.
8 Townsend Manuscript, third lecture, Columbiana Collection, Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscript Library. Compare the notes by Thomas A. Brayton (MS 70–1713) in the collection of the New York Public Library, Manuscripts Division.
9 Townsend Manuscript, second lecture, Columbiana Collection, Columbia University Library Rare Books and Manuscript Library.
10 A Correspondent, “Cultivation of Natural History,” p. 159.
11 Ibid.
12 It is evident that the course evolved over Mitchill’s life, and that its structure changed: for instance, it appears that early on the class ended not with the section on man but with an additional sequence of lectures on “uranology,” or astronomy. See “Outline of Professor Mitchill’s Lectures on Natural History, in the College of New-York, delivered in 1809–1810, previous to his departure for Albany, to take his seat in the Legislature of the State,” The Medical Repository 13 (1809–1810), pp. 257–267 (NB: This journal has a complicated publishing history; a digital edition is now available, but I have found that the ProQuest citation format is not reliable; I have followed the citation format of Hall, A Scientist in the Early Republic). It is interesting to consider the extent to which natural history in this period feels like a discipline organized by its pedagogical obligations. The “order of nature” turns out to conform with uncanny precision to the “order of a year-long lecture class.”
13 On this notion of continuity in the organic world, see the classic study (originally composed in the 1930s), Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: The Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966).
14 For a clear statement of his pedagogical philosophy, see the pamphlet published in the 1820s by the College of Physicians to promote Mitchill’s course, which closes as follows: “It is the invariable practice of the Professor to teach by specimen, picture, map, diagram, table, &c. to the whole extent of which such representations are susceptible; under a conviction that material objects, aid most impressively the abstract conceptions of the understanding.” College of Physicians and Surgeons in the City of New York, A Concise Memorandum of Certain Articles Contained in the Museum of Samuel L. Mitchill (New York: E. Conrad, circa 1825).
15 A Correspondent, “Cultivation of Natural History,” p. 161. Mitchill’s slightly truculent enthusiasm here and elsewhere must always be understood as a tacit rejoinder to the thread of argument in European natural history that asserted American plants and animals lacked size and vigor (on account of climate, etc.). For a résumé of this long-standing debate, see Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973).
16 “[I]f by any force of the currents of the ocean, or any conflicts of the wind and the waves, a new surface of earth should emerge from the neighborhood of Cape Hatteras, would it be unconstitutional to take possession of it?” Cited in Hall, A Scientist in the Early Republic, p. 114.
17 Lisa Rosner, Medical Education in the Age of Improvement: Edinburgh Students and Apprentices, 1760–1826 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991). See particularly chapter 3 for a discussion of the curriculum in the relevant years, and pp. 47–48 for Munro’s anatomy class. Also relevant, for context on the American graduates from Edinburgh who returned to the United States to practice, is Lisa Rosner’s “Thistle on the Delaware: Edinburgh Medical Education and Philadelphia Practice, 1800–1825,” Social History of Medicine 5, no. 1 (1992), pp. 19–42.
18 Georges Cuvier, Essay on the Theory of the Earth, edited by Robert Jameson, with additions and a new introduction by Samuel Latham Mitchill (New York: Kirk and Mercein, 1818). See Mitchill’s introduction.
19 It is interesting to review advertisements in the New York papers from this period for insight into the availability of continental natural history publications. For instance, see the posting in the Commercial Advertiser of 12 February 1819 by a bookseller with the improbable name of Fernangus de Gelone, who announced that he had for sale “A great quantity of the best and latest publications on medicine, mineralogy, botany, natural history, and mathematics” including Buffon, La Treille, all twelve volumes of Humboldt’s Personal Narrative (this would seem to have been a French edition, since the English ones were all shorter, as far as I know), and an edition of Aristotle’s “On Animals” in the original Greek.
20 The latter was in the library of the cabinet of the Literary and Philosophical Society. See “Donations for the Library and Cabinet,” Transactions of the Literary and Philosophical Society of New-York 1 (1815), in the backmatter.
21 Minutes of the Lyceum of Natural History for 4 January 1819, collection of the New York Academy of Sciences.
22 Samuel Latham Mitchill, “The Fishes of New-York,” Transactions of the Literary and Philosophical Society of New-York 1 (1815), pp. 355–492, at p. 358.
23 Since this work was published between 1798 and 1802, it is noteworthy that Mitchill omits mention of it in his list of sources. The almost reliable confidence-man-cum-naturalist Constantine S. Rafinesque (“Introduction to the Ichthyology of the United States,” American Monthly Magazine and Critical Review 2 [1818], pp. 202–207, at p. 202) would comment in 1818 on the inadequacy of Lacépède for New World species, but that leaves open whether Mitchill had the book to hand as he worked up his specimens in the early teens. For a brief (and not wholly satisfactory) discussion of Mitchill’s continental correspondents and readers, see Hall, A Scientist in the Early Republic, pp. 85–86. Work in French archives could presumably sort out these issues. For an interesting discussion of Lacépède’s fish taxonomy, see Alan H. Bornbusch, “Lacépède and Cuvier: A Comparative Case Study of Goals and Methods in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Fish Classification,” Journal of the History of Biology 22, no. 1 (Spring 1989), pp. 141–161.
24 DeWitt Clinton, “An Introductory Discourse,” Transactions of the Literary and Philosophical Society of New-York 1 (1815), pp. 19–184, at p. 47.
25 Ibid., p. 49.
26 Hall, A Scientist in the Early Republic, p. 71.
27 Circular issued from the New-York Institution: Samuel L. Mitchill, “American Zoology and Geology,” dated March of 1817. This may exist in other collections, but the only copy I have seen is the one tipped in to the Minute Book of the New-York Historical Society, circa 1818 (manuscript collection of the New-York Historical Society).
28 Francis, Reminiscences of Samuel Latham Mitchill, p. 16.
29 Mitchill, “American Zoology and Geology.” For the provenance of this document, see footnote 27 supra.
30 IWF, p. 26.
31 On this community see: McKay, South Street; and Robert Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 1815–1860 (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1939).
32 IWF, p. 26.
33 Ibid., p. 28.
34 The notebooks survive in the Long Island Collection of the East Hampton Library (KP 30 Mitchell [sic], Samuel Latham; MS. Lectures on Zoology). I cite here from volume 2. My thanks to John Walden, Dorothy King, and Marci Vail for their help with this collection, which has not been catalogued in any manuscript database (a mention of the books is made in Hall, but there is no evidence that he used them). Internal evidence gives one solid date in connection with the notebooks, 1817.
35 The insertion “e” represents Mitchill’s own labeled marginal annotation to his original text.
36 The original reads: “Nos nè à communi hominum opinione nimis recedamus; & ut affectatae novitatis notam evitemus. Cetaceum Aquatilium genus, quamvis cum Quadrupedibus viviparis in omnibus ferè praeterquam in pilis & pedibus & elemento in quo degunt, convenire videantur, Piscibus annumerabimus.” John Ray, Synopsis Methodica Animalium Quadrupedum et Serpentini Generis (London: Southwell, 1693), p. 55.
37 Francis Willughby and John Ray, De Historia Piscium (Oxford: Sheldon, 1686), p. 1. I used the Princeton copy, Ex 8879.975q. The original reads: “Animal aquatile, pedibus carens, vel squammis vel cute nuda contectum, pinnis natans, in aquis perpetuo degens, nec sponte unquam in siccum exiens.”
38 Linnaeus, Systema Naturae (Leiden: Haak, 1756), p. 39, note. Cited in Daudin, Cuvier et Lamarck, p. 125.
39 On Linnaeus’s friendship with Artedi, see Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 34, 35, 154.
40 See Jacques Brisson, Ornithologie (Paris: Bauche, 1760), vol. 1, p. xi. For the Linnaeus quote: Systema Naturae (Stockholm: Salvius, 1758), vol. 1, p. 16; see also the discussion in the editions of 1766–1767. For a review: Daudin, Cuvier et Lamarck, pp. 126–127.
41 It is worth asking to what degree the firming of these positions in the period was bound up with the increasing specialization and institutionalization of zoology in these years. Or, to put it a different way, once there were experts in “cetology” (like Bonnaterre), the taxon had won itself a vigorous coterie of stakeholding defenders.
42 John Hunter, “Observations on the Structure and Oeconomy of Whales,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 77 (1787), pp. 371–450; Pierre Joseph Bonnaterre’s Cétologie (Paris: Chez Panckoucke, 1789) was published as a separate book, but it was also properly a volume in the Tableau Encyclopédique et Méthodique des Trois Règnes de la Nature, the massive illustrated natural history published in Paris during the years of the Revolution (and continued well into the nineteenth century) under the editorial guidance of Charles-Joseph Panckoucke.
43 Daudin, Cuvier et Lamarck, p. 129.
44 Bloch himself, in earlier editions, excluded the “great whales” from his ichthyology, but did include a number of the smaller cetaceans.
45 Much to the infuriation of Adrien-Gilles Camper, who singled Castel out for abuse in the publication of Camper père’s posthumous volume on cetaceans: Pierre Camper, Observations Anatomiques sur la Structure Intérieure et le Squelette de Plusieurs Espèces de Cétacés, with notes by Georges Cuvier (Paris: Gabriel Dufour, 1820). See p. 21.
46 “Se dit des grands poissons.” For evidence that Noël François de Wailly’s Nouveau Vocabulaire François (Paris: Rémont, 1803) was for sale in New York in this period, see Evening Post, 18 January 1806, p. 4.
47 George Shaw, General Zoology, or Systematic Natural History (London: G. Kearsley, 1800–1826), vol. 2, pp. 471–472. At the same time, Shaw conveniently reprinted as an appendix to his second volume on mammals nearly the whole of Hunter’s 1787 monograph on the whales from the Philosophical Transactions (Hunter, “Observations on the Structure and Oeconomy of Whales”) so Mitchill would have had that work—which was very firm that whales were not fish—to hand (though without its detailed plates).
48 For “hot-blooded fish,” see Cuvier, Le Règne Animal (Paris: Déterville, 1829), vol. 1, p. 69. On Cuvier’s attachment to the term “quadruped,” see Goulven Laurent, Paléontologie et Evolution en France de 1800 à 1860: Une Histoire des Idées de Cuvier et Lamarck à Darwin (Paris: Editions du C.T.H.S., 1987), pp. 76 and 101.
49 Mentioned in John C. Greene, American Science, p. 92. Unfortunately, however, the reference he gives there (Transactions of the Society Instituted in the State of New-York for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts, and Manufactures 1 [1792], pp. ix–x) does not appear to be correct.
50 Thomas Jefferson, Report of the Secretary of State on the subject of the Cod and Whale Fisheries, Made to the House of Representatives, 1 February 1791 (Philadelphia: Francis Childe and John Swaine, 1791). This was also reprinted in the House of Representatives Miscellaneous Documents (no. 32) for the 42nd Congress, 2nd session.
51 Publishing, for instance, essays on the “Cod Fishery in the United States” and on the “Extension of the Means of Relief to Fredish Seamen” in 1804–1805. Both appeared in The Medical Repository 8 (1804–1805).
52 On the trade in sea-elephant products, see Briton Cooper Busch, “Elephants and Whales: New London and Desolation, 1840–1900,” American Neptune 40, no. 2 (1980), pp. 117–126. On the boiled sea-elephant tongue, see the manuscript Minutes of the Lyceum of Natural History for 12 May 1817, collection of the New York Academy of Sciences. On the turtle and fish, see Hall, A Scientist in the Early Republic, pp. 10–12, and Francis, Reminiscences of Samuel Latham Mitchill, p. 20.
53 Mitchill, “The Fishes of New-York,” p. 453.
54 These drawings survive in the Issachar Cozzens Collection at the New-York Historical Society. While a good deal of this material was collected by Cozzens himself, quite a few items (particularly the earlier pieces) came originally from “among the rest of Dr. Saml L. Mitchill papers in the old poorhouse cellar [i.e., the basement of the New-York Institution],” as Cozzens put it in an annotation on item No. 87. I think the odds are excellent that the Barnard drawings came to Cozzens via Mitchill.
55 Maritime studies were considered the organization’s greatest strength, in large part (one supposes) because of Mitchill’s leadership: see the comment by John W. Francis (a former member) in his 1858 book Old New York, where the Lyceum is briefly mentioned with the aside that “many of the rarest treasures of our marine waters have become known by the investigations of the Lyceum” (p. 372).
56 Manuscript Minutes of the Lyceum of Natural History for 13 October 1817, collection of the New York Academy of Sciences. The correspondent was Jeremy Robinson (see supra, chapter 1, n. 3), some of whose letters (including correspondence with Mitchill) are preserved in the Library of Congress in the Peter Force papers.
57 Manuscript Minutes of the Lyceum of Natural History for 25 May 1818, collection of the New York Academy of Sciences. For a very interesting history of scientific investigation of ambergris, see K. H. Dannenfeldt, “Ambergris: The Search for Its Origin,” Isis 73 (1982), pp. 382–397. By the early 1820s Mitchill was in fact using spermaceti as a specimen of “Materia Medica” in his lecture course at the College of Physicians. Whether he was doing so in the late teens I have been unable to establish. See College of Physicians and Surgeons, Articles Contained in the Museum of Samuel L. Mitchill.
58 Manuscript Minutes of the Lyceum of Natural History for 9 March 1818, collection of the New York Academy of Sciences.
59 Chandos Michael Brown, “A Natural History of the Gloucester Sea Serpent: Knowledge, Power, and the Culture of Science in Antebellum America,” American Quarterly 42, no. 3 (1990), pp. 402–436.
60 Manuscript Minutes of the Lyceum of Natural History for 24 November 1817, collection of the New York Academy of Sciences. Linguistic purists might like an admission here that the term “bunk” did not exist in 1817 (it was coined in 1820 in debates over the Missouri Compromise); “debunking” came almost a century later.
61 See American Magazine and Critical Review 1 (1817), pp. 443–444 and the references there.
62 This image is instructive, in that it indicates how unfamiliar even seagoing Americans were with the large rorquals (the general term for the baleen whales with grooved, expandible throats—for instance, what we now call blue and fin whales), which were not hunted in these years, as I discuss below, chapter 4. Any twentieth-century whaler would immediately identify the looming, striated thing in this image as a dead rorqual floating upside-down in the water (so that its pleated underbody, swollen with the gasses of decomposition, arched up above the surface). The sight was a commonplace at the Antarctic whaling stations before World War II. Mitchill’s article, and the illustration, appear in Mitchill, “Facts and Observations Showing the Existence of Large Animals in the Ocean,” The Medical Repository 16 (1812–1813), pp. 396–407.
63 DeWitt Clinton, “An Introductory Discourse,” p. 106, note n. For an early suggestion that the mammoth was “of an amphibious nature,” see Rembrandt Peale, “A Short Account of the Mammoth,” Philosophical Magazine 14 (1803), pp. 162–169. Cohen (The Fate of the Mammoth, p. 46) notes that Leibniz identified a mammoth tooth as that of a marine animal.
64 IWF, p. 30.
65 Ibid., p. 31; emphasis in original.
66 Ibid., p. 31. Sampson’s showy rhetorical style, and his particular success in the New York courts (which developed a distinctive character in this period, more open to grandstanding than the courts of Philadelphia and Boston), are discussed in Millender, “Transformation of the American Criminal Trial,” chapter 3.
67 IWF, p. 73.
68 Ibid., p. 33.
69 Ibid., p. 34.
70 Ibid., p. 37. Mitchill himself apparently here recurred to the “common usage” meaning of “fish” (a creature that lives in the water), since he himself was fully committed to placing squid in the order “Mollusca,” concerning which he considered himself something of an expert. See Mitchill, “Facts and Observations.”
71 IWF, p. 38.
72 For a review of the English debates around the Linnaean system in this period, see Mario A. DiGregorio, “In Search of the Natural System: Problems of Zoological Classification in Victorian Britain,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 4 (1982), pp. 225–254. Sampson includes a reference to the “Cetology” article (IWF, p. 83), and a reading of it leaves no doubt that it is from this source that he assembled the reference base he used to undermine Mitchill’s testimony. See “Cetology,” in David Brewster, ed., New Edinburgh Encyclopedia, 2nd American edition (New York: Whiting and Watson, 1814). It is interesting to think about the use of encyclopedias in the trial (they are referred to four times) in the context of Yeo’s article on encyclopedias and professionalization in the sciences in this period: Richard Yeo, “Reading Encyclopedias: Science and the Organization of Knowledge in British Dictionaries of Arts and Sciences, 1730–1850,” Isis 82, no. 1 (1991), pp. 24–49. See also his Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Arthur Hughes, “Science in English Encyclopedias, 1704–1875,” Annals of Science 7, no. 4 (1951), pp. 340–370.
73 For Pennant’s interest in cetaceans, see the “Description of the Blunt-Headed Cachalot” by James Robertson, which Pennant communicated to the Royal Society in 1770 (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 60 [1770], pp. 321–324).
74 Thomas Pennant, History of Quadrupeds (London: B. White, 1781), vol. 1, p. iv. The passage is unchanged (at pp. iv–v) in the 1793 edition, which is the one Sampson is most likely to have used.
75 Porter discusses the movement of Buffon to the United States in this period. See Porter, The Eagle’s Nest, p. 16.
76 The remark is quoted in Donald M. Hassler, “Enlightenment Genres and Science Fiction: Belief and Animated Nature (1774),” Extrapolation 29, no. 4 (1988), pp. 322–329, at p. 325.
77 Cited in James Hall Pitman, Goldsmith’s Animated Nature: A Study of Goldsmith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1924), p. 15.
78 Oliver Goldsmith, A History of the Earth and Animated Nature (London: Wingrave and Collingwood, 1816), vol. 5, p. 27.
79 I have consulted the second edition, 1810, in the holdings of the New York Public Library, but find no record of a first edition in any catalogued collection in the U.S. or abroad.
80 John Bigland, Letters on Natural History (London: James Cundee, 1810), p. 340.
81 IWF, p. 35.
82 Ibid., p. 70. For a period discussion of this problem in the literature of natural history, see Pennant, History of Quadrupeds, introduction.
83 IWF, p. 42. On Mitchill’s support for Rees, see the manuscript letter (dated 3 March 1820) seeking subvention of the publication of the American edition, signed by Mitchill (along with DeWitt Clinton, David Hosack, and others), which calls the Cyclopedia a “rich and valuable body of information.” Archives of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
84 The question marks in this quote I have inserted; they appear as full stops in the original text. IWF, p. 70.
85 IWF, pp. 70–71. See also p. 73, where Sampson pressed the issue of the maiden and the bat, playing off Linnaeus’s early classification of the bats as belonging in the category “quadrumana”: “figure to yourselves gentlemen, a beautiful woman in the act of nursing her first child, her eyes beaming with tenderness and love, and grace and beauty in her form and attitude; and now imagine me a Borneo bat, clinging torpidly in some filthy hole, by the hooks which terminate its hinder extremities, its head downwards, its ugly brood sticking to its dugs, and reconcile, if you can, this fantastical association to decency or reason.”
86 IWF, p. 74. For helpful context on American contact with and ideas about primates, see Brett Mizelle, “ ‘Man Cannot Behold It Without Contemplating Himself’: Monkeys, Apes and Human Identity in the Early American Republic,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 66 (1999), pp. 144–173.
87 IWF, p. 61.
88 For a discussion of these events, see chapters 3 and 4 of Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Also useful: Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), particularly chapter 7. More generally on the changing party politics of the period: Dixon Ryan Fox, The Decline of the Aristocracy in the Politics of New York, 1801–1840 (New York: Harper and Row, 1965); and Harvey Strum, “Property Qualifications and Voting Behavior in New York, 1807–1816,” Journal of the Early Republic 1 (1981), pp. 347–371. For the role of the Clintonians, see Evan Cornog, The Birth of Empire: DeWitt Clinton and the American Experience, 1769–1828 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), particularly pp. 138–144.
89 For a detailed discussion of the texts and ideas that would have informed Anthon’s listeners on this topic, see Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), as well as Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968).
90 The case is discussed by Irving Browne in “William Sampson,” The Green Bag 3, no. 8 (1896), pp. 313–325, at p. 324. I have read the proceedings in Jacob D. Wheeler, Reports of Criminal Law Cases (New York: Banks and Brothers, 1860), pp. 194–236. The quote comes from p. 194.
91 Wheeler, Reports of Criminal Law Cases, p. 196.
92 Ibid., p. 197.
93 The publishing history of Wheeler’s Reports is complex: my reference to the “third volume” indicates not the 1860 printing cited above, but rather the original series publication of 1823–1825. There is surprisingly little secondary literature on The Commissioners of the Almshouse v. Alexander Whistelo, given the interesting issues at play in the case. It is briefly discussed in Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), pp. 162–163. For further evidence of Mitchill’s continued investigations of racial science (specifically the taxonomically and politically troublesome issue of darker-skinned people “turning white”), consider the article published in Trenton, New Jersey, “ ‘The Ethiopian’ has changed ‘his skin,’” Federalist, 1 November 1824, p. 2.
94 IWF, p. 25.
95 It is worth noting that the kind of erudition that Sampson displayed during the trial—the product of a quick “cram” using encyclopedias and other reference works—had been for some time a source of anxiety (particularly in Britain) among “true” savants, who looked on in horror as a hyperactive book trade retailed “learning” at bargain-basement prices. For a helpful introduction to these disputes, see Roger D. Lund, “The Eel of Science: Index Learning, Scriblerian Satire, and the Rise of Information Culture,” Eighteenth-Century Life 22, no. 2 (1998), pp. 18–42.
96 IWF, p. 71.
97 Ibid., p. 73.
98 Ibid., p. 69. For a remarkable tracing of the history of the trope at issue here, see Robert K. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript (New York: Free Press, 1965).
99 IWF, p. 73; emphasis original.
100 It should be noted that there is much to be said about the etymological trajectories of the two Latin terms that come to be translated as “whale,” and there are implications for biblical exegesis as well as the history of whale-knowledge. For a taste of all this, consider: James Byrne, “Cetus and Balena,” unpublished paper, 2003.
101 IWF, p. 69.
102 Ibid., p. 38.
103 Ibid., p. 75. In this respect it is interesting to see the language of natural history being deployed satirically with respect to Mitchill’s politics in the newspapers of the period. For instance, in 1820, the American, in an editorial on the political machinations of DeWitt Clinton’s administration, identified its targets by their party affiliations (“Federalist,” “Clintonian,” etc.) but called Mitchill a “Non-descript”—the technical term for an unidentified species. See American, 10 May 1820, p. 2.
104 IWF, p. 71.
105 Ibid., p. 31.
106 Ibid., p. 32. The image of the amphibious philosopher might merit a longer look. It was Sir Thomas Browne, writing in the Religio Medici of 1642, who suggested that man was “that great and true amphibium,” in that he passed through all of the “five kinds of existences which comprehend the creatures not of the world only, but of the universe” (namely, “rude mass,” plant, animal, man, and spirit). See Sir Thomas Browne, Selected Writings, edited by Claire Preston (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 19. For a curious nineteenth-century counterpoint, consider Charles Lyell’s striking reverie about what sort of theory of the earth might be dreamed up by an aquatic geologist: Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (London: John Murray, 1830), vol. 1, pp. 81–82. Could Lyell have been thinking here of Sampson’s eccentric friend Return Maycomb-MacDonnell? See Frum O. Combist’s brief account of the latter’s life in The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Scientists.
107 IWF, p. 67; question mark added. The language, of course, is that of the Book of Job, chapter 41. It was not the first time Mitchill had been likened to a cetacean. Frederick Hall, who had cast his lot in American science with Benjamin Silliman, wrote him a snide note in 1813 about Mitchill’s blowhard lecture style: “He then plunges into the ocean, and after puffing about awhile, like a porpoise, gives us a complete explanation of all its phenomina [sic], tells us what has become of the waters of the deluge [etc.]…” Cited in Brown, Benjamin Silliman, p. 297.
108 IWF, p. 34.
109 Ibid., pp. 68–69. It is clear here and elsewhere the extent to which the participants in the trial worked to position themselves with respect to the increasingly strident rhetoric of democratic equality that marked the politics of New York in this period. For a sense of the context, see: Dixon Ryan Fox, The Decline of Aristocracy in the Politics of New York; and Douglas T. Miller, Jacksonian Aristocracy: Class and Democracy in New York, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), particularly the preface and chapter 1.
110 IWF, p. 67.