SEVEN    Conclusion

NEW SCIENCE, NEW YORK, NEW NATION

Back in the introduction I gave three reasons for taking up a detailed study of Maurice v. Judd from the perspective of the history of science, and I want here by way of summary and conclusion to return to those three themes, reviewing them in the following order: first, Maurice v. Judd as an occasion to investigate cetaceans as “problems of knowledge” between 1750 and 1850; second, Maurice v. Judd as a window onto the contested terrain of zoological classification in this same period; and third, Maurice v. Judd as an opportunity to assess the broader place of natural history (and the sciences more generally) both in New York and in the United States as a whole in the early nineteenth century.

Turning to the first of these considerations: There can be, I think, little doubt that whales were “problematic” organisms on the watershed of the nineteenth century. The conflict at the heart of this study shows as much, and I suspect one would find similar complexity were one to consider the mythical, symbolic, and monstrous figurations of these creatures across a wide range of cultures and many centuries. Massive, furtive, valuable, at times dangerous, the whale has long occupied a place in the imagination of sea-conscious peoples proportional to its great bulk. Where mighty mysteries are concerned, systematic investigation is likely to be a fraught matter. Indeed (as Melville and Sampson both knew well), within the framework of a dutiful Christian natural theology, cetology—formal whale-knowledge—could even have about it the scent of the impious and the transgressive, particularly in view of the unique position accorded to “Leviathan” in the Book of Job. For there man’s ignorance of the sea-giants stands as nothing less than the final and thunderous trump card played by God against the whole game of inordinate human intellectual aspirations: Job knew nothing of Leviathan; how then could Jehovah be expected to answer questions about the nature of evil?

It is one thing, however, to talk in a general way about whales as “mysterious” creatures, and yet another to dig in on a particular time and place with an eye toward understanding who knew what about these animals, how, and in what ways they authorized their claims. It is this latter project that has been my preoccupation throughout this book: recognizing Maurice v. Judd as an arena where different kinds of whaleknowledge would be permitted to stake out territory, evidence expertise, and joust with opponents, I have used the Mayor’s Court as the centering point for an examination of four different communities whose claims about whales were at issue in the trial—university-trained natural philosophers, practical whalemen, businesslike men of affairs, and “everyone else,” the ordinary English speakers of New York. This human taxonomy followed the groupings offered by the actual participants in the trial, who themselves recognized that the proper investigation of natural order was contingent on a proper parsing of social class, guild, and geography. Separate chapters took up whale-knowledge among these different groups, and marshaled diverse sources—natural history lecture notes, school primers, biblical commentary, published taxonomic systems, manuscript logbooks, sailors’ doggerel, commodity market broadsheets, private correspondence, museum inventories, curriers’ handbooks, etc.—in an effort to recover and sketch the different ideas about whales and dolphins that circulated in this period. Wherever possible I have tried to stress the dynamic quality of these different bodies of knowledge: literate whalemen had their opinions about bookish cetology, and university zoologists sounded whalers on the anatomy and behavior of their quarry; changing prices and availability bore on the taxonomic hierarchies used by men who traded in whale products, and who thus had their own ideas about the relevant groupings of the animals from which those products came. In each case it was possible to return to the court itself and to see these different claims—and these different kinds of authority—set against each other in the forensic confines of the trial, where each assertion had to withstand assaults rhetorical, empirical, and even epistemological. What a witness knew, how he knew it, and, finally, who he was were all fair game in the Mayor’s Court, and each of these distinct dimensions of the testimony could be used to undermine the others.

Approached in this way, Maurice v. Judd has yielded a number of insights about the knowledge of cetaceans as it evolved during the hundred years between the publications of the tenth edition of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1758) and Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859). In chapter 2, which worked to set up what ordinary New Yorkers considered the “doxa” on whales and fish in 1818, a survey of public cabinets of natural history in the city revealed the anomalous treatment of whale specimens in the most popular collection open to curious citizens: in Scudder’s American Museum bones from the skull of a whale were catalogued with “miscellaneous” objects, a class that defied the seemingly basic distinction between the products of nature and the products of art; this placement can be seen to highlight the degree to which these animals resisted even the most fundamental classifications, since the exceptional character of whales was built into the very configuration of the city’s new and highly visible temple to the sciences.

The presiding figure at that temple was Samuel Latham Mitchill, who figured as the star witness for the defense in Maurice v. Judd, where he was presented explicitly as the embodiment of science and reason. Chapter 3 took up Mitchill’s efforts to install regard for natural history in the city in the first decades of the nineteenth century, his teaching and research in the sciences of classification, his particular interest in the sea, his specific knowledge of the cetes, and, finally, the fate of his trial testimony that “a whale is not a fish.” I showed that Mitchill went to great lengths to teach natural history as a dynamic, inclusive, and democratic science, one that traded on the expansive energies of American sailors and merchants, and one that welcomed new arguments and original ideas. Turning to the trial, I contended that Mitchill’s adversaries turned this vision of natural history against itself, stripping Mitchill’s rhetoric of its populist trappings, and using his own emphasis on disputation and novelty to corrode the authority of his “new philosophy” and the “modern school” in taxonomy. By underlining that Mitchill’s systematics carried implications for the place of human beings in nature, and by indulging in well-informed exercises of classificatory reductio ad absurdum, the lawyers for James Maurice succeeded in depicting Mitchill and his acolytes as risible at best, and quite possibly as something much worse—as slippery and protean purveyors of an amphibious philosophy that dissolved essential boundaries between men and beasts, and thus constituted, perhaps, a veritable threat to civic life.

At the heart of this charge lay Mitchill’s shocking declaration that a whale was “no more a fish than a man.” In a section bearing that title I situated this remark, showing that Mitchill—who had conducted considerable investigations in ichthyology—was acutely aware of the changing ways that systematists had endeavored over the previous fifty years to draw boundaries between fish and cetes. His insistence that whales and dolphins belonged in the Linnaean category of the Mammalia reflected a broader commitment to the radical implications of this class. In assessing Mitchill’s efforts to settle the taxonomic status of the whales, I argued that the reception of his arguments must be understood in a wider cultural and intellectual context: generally speaking, this episode of “taxonomy at the bar” is part of a larger story of American responses to the rapid development of comparative anatomy in Paris and Edinburgh, and the whole affair certainly demonstrates the durability of Buffon in English book-trade natural history; at the same time, Maurice v. Judd reflects a public fascination with monsters quite specifically linked to very local preoccupations, for instance the “craze” surrounding the Gloucester sea serpent, and the contemporary unearthing of the bones of antediluvian mammoths.

Set against Mitchill’s textual knowledge of whales (which he derived from the stack of Anglo-continental tomes he kept to hand when practicing natural history) was the testimony of whalemen who had encountered these creatures in full career in the open sea. That the two such men to testify in Maurice v. Judd did so on opposite sides of the question served as the point of departure for chapter 4, which revisited the problem of “the whaleman’s natural history,” and sought to reconstruct what whalemen understood about their prey, and into what broader ideas about nature that knowledge fit. Using both published sources and the clues scattered in whaling manuscripts, I offered a revisionist assessment of the traditional view that whalemen took little interest in natural history. On the contrary, the minute details of cutting-in diagrams bring into evidence a largely tacit vernacular anatomy and physiology of some sophistication. In addition, I worked to demonstrate that a broader natural history of the sea surface was implicit in a whaler’s-eye-view of the whale and the ocean. If whalemen’s knowledge of whales was intimate, it was by no means settled nor entirely settling, and the blubber-hunter’s nomenclature translated imprecisely into the language of formal natural history: Did whalemen think whales were fish? Notwithstanding the writings of Hohman and other scholars of the whaling industry, most did, but many of them also expressed ambivalence about this ranking. Moreover, among whalers, not all whales were even, properly speaking, “whales”—a term many of them reserved for the whales that could be turned into dollars.

Finally, in chapter 5 I stalked “the whale in the Swamp,” in order to show that, above all, Maurice v. Judd represented a showdown between powerful factions within the city’s community of commercial elites. The dispute articulated itself in taxonomic terms, but the contours of the classifications traced boundaries between buyers and sellers, leathermen and chandlers, Knickerbockers and Yankees. At issue were changing economies of production, and lobbying efforts to create new legal sanctions and protections for the industrial ambitions of a rising generation of merchant-financiers. By tracing the implicit and explicit taxonomies of craft and the market, this chapter not only revealed the ways that money and labor gave shape to particular ideas about the order of nature, but also demonstrated that any effort to understand whale-knowledge in the nineteenth century demands a detailed investigation of these animals as commercial entities and must follow their course through the channels of trade and production. In many ways whales in this period loomed even larger in stacked casks than they did in the open sea.

So much for Maurice v. Judd as an occasion to consider whales as problems of knowledge between the 1750s and the 1850s. But what about the not-unrelated second rationale for so close an investigation of this trial: Maurice v. Judd as a window onto the contested terrain of zoological classification in this same period? Here I argued from the outset that this case would afford a valuable opportunity to contribute to a growing revisionist literature that has called into question a dominant narrative in the history of science—a narrative that considers the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the “golden age” of the classificatory sciences, a period that saw the emergence of powerful new tools for arranging plants and animals into incontrovertibly coherent categories, categories that reflected the real affinities of these natural kinds and, by doing so, provided the conditions of possibility for the revolutionary genealogical and dynamic accounts of organic form and organization that would radically alter human understanding of nature. As I suggested in the introduction, recent scholarship in the history of science has shed new light on this story: by focusing on “difficult” organisms and adopting a perspective eccentric to the landmark publications in natural history—in short, by working under and around a familiar pageant of eloge and citation—a number of studies have demonstrated that the late Enlightenment victory of the classifiers, for all the strength of its metropolitan redoubts, did not extend very deep into the hinterland. On the contrary, communities of lay expertise—animal breeders, fanciers, veterinarians—had very different ideas about the order of nature, ideas grounded in particular kinds of close knowledge of particular taxons. From the perspective of these groups the early nineteenth century looked less like a taxonomic calm before the Darwinian storm (as one strand in the traditional historiography would have it), and more like an era of instability and change, when established orders were under siege and taxonomic expertise various and hotly contested. Nor were the perspectives of these “other” experts entirely overlooked by practitioners of the new classificatory sciences of comparative anatomy and systematic botany. By remaining sensitive to the migrations of ideas, terms, specimens, and practices across the quickening boundary between lay and “professional” naturalists, new histories of natural history become possible.

Maurice v. Judd has provided a rewarding point of entry for an investigation of these themes in the context of the United States. I am convinced that this examination of the case has demonstrated that, rightly understood, this period saw not the comfortable installation of a new and presiding natural order, but rather something much closer to an emerging “vacuum of zoological authority” in the early Republic.1 Mitchill’s testimony and the many-leveled rejection of his efforts provide compelling evidence on this point. But at the same time, I would like to offer this detailed treatment of Maurice v. Judd as something more than a transatlantic extension of an argument already advanced for Britain in the same period. After all, it is not enough simply to recover and rehabilitate largely forgotten “underworlds” of taxonomic activity and zoological expertise. Sure, there is something to be said for merely digging out these texts and voices, but such a program cannot disregard the important distinctions between these communities and the networks of increasingly formal natural history in the period. A more expansive view cannot be won simply by leveling the ground. On the contrary, by widening the stage on which we can see the history of natural order played out, we in fact create new opportunities to illuminate why certain players take center stage, steal the best lines, wind up as stars. In other words, while there is a value in showing that this period witnessed a much louder and more cacophonous conversation about the system of nature than the scholarship might have led us to expect, such a showing must serve as the point of departure for investigations of the emergence of the natural sciences themselves: in manifold ways this boisterous conversation was not just about animal groupings, it was fundamentally about a human taxonomy as well, since it is not merely that out of the hubbub came the categories of “whale” and “fish”; out of the hubbub also came the categories of “scientist” and “layman,” “philosopher” and “fool.” Hence, when at a dreadful family dinner in 1827 the eighteen-year-old whippersnapper Charles Darwin heard the pompous society physician Dr. Henry Holland declare whales to be cold-blooded, what the ambitious young naturalist actually heard him saying was, in effect, “I am a cad.”²

With these problems in mind, I have made a concentrated effort throughout this study to show in detail how different orderings of nature served to delineate and ratify different social orderings: in the Mayor’s Court whether whales were fish came to hang on matters of class, labor, and geography. That James Reeves was a sailor before the mast positioned his opinion with respect to that of Captain Fish in ways deemed significant to the resolution of the question. That Gideon Lee considered himself a “northern man” and not an “easterner” inflected his taxonomy in a meaningful way. Throughout the trial, taxonomies of nature defined communities of practice and figured social identities. It was in an extension of this same process, as I will argue below, that Mitchill’s testimony on the question before the court gave important shape to the persona of the natural philosopher; in this way the case of Maurice v. Judd ultimately became a referendum not merely on a quirky classification of some odd beasts, but on the very place of science in the political life of the city and the state.

But before turning to that matter, what if we focus for just a moment on a more narrowly conceived history of the classificatory sciences: Does Maurice v. Judd have anything to offer here? I believe it does. In order to make sense of Mitchill’s testimony, it proved necessary to investigate closely the process by which a set of marine creatures came to be codified, subdivided, and eventually redistributed across the emerging orthodox natural system of the early nineteenth century. I showed that this occurred later, and with less certainty (and more dissent) than has been commonly recognized, and that the moves traced—even defined—larger shifts in zoology in this period. What came to light was the durability of older groupings—“quadrupeds,” “fish-like animals”—that were resurrected in these years to serve new functions in the face of some of the unnerving juxtapositions implicit (or even explicit) in the Linnaean system, and in its at times disconcerting elaboration by the practitioners of comparative anatomy. The movement into the interior of organisms, and the commitment to the idea that hidden anatomy would instruct adepts in the differences-that-made-the-most-difference in nature—those two pillars of the “new philosophy”—were revealed to be shakier, and harder to transport and erect outside the precincts of the Jardin of the Paris Museum of Natural History than might have been expected. Just how much difference did deep internal anatomy make in the consideration of an animal whose whole social reality in the city of New York could be more or less reduced to an external layer eight inches thick? If whalemen testified that the whale sometimes vanished into the depths for indefinite stretches, or that it blew water in its spout, then could the mere fact of its having lungs be taken to prove that it could not breathe underwater? The case of Maurice v. Judd thus suggests that not enough attention has been paid to resistance to Cuvier’s scalpel as the hegemonic instrument in the classificatory sciences of zoology. As the work of Blainville and Swainson later in the century would demonstrate, there remained those who insisted that external appearances held vital clues to natural order: for Swainson, the superficial similarities between whales and fish became an essential linkage in the geometry of the quinary system; for Blainville, there was something manifestly ridiculous about a system for understanding living creatures that was powerless until it had a dead body on the dissecting table. These were both views, one suspects, that a Nantucket whaleman would have appreciated.

At the same time, this discussion of Maurice v. Judd has suggested the importance of restoring the centrality of the tripartite organization of biblical zoology to the taxonomic debates of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.3 Updating his father by letter after the trial, the young Henry Meigs wrote that the whole whale/fish affair had put him in mind of a couplet in Samuel Butler’s mocking Hudibras (circa 1662) where the “old philosophers” came under scrutiny for their preposterous “grand distinctions.” As Meigs put it, such quixotic systematists of antiquity famously “included ships and all other things in or on water, among the Fishes! Windmills &c. on land for Animals Terrestrial! And flying arrows or wigs, [as] birds!”⁴ A careened ship, by these lights, ceased to be a fish, since it had been pulled ashore. Meigs’s erudite and scathing commentary on popular sensibilities is yet further evidence that the Genesical division of animals into those that fly, those that swim, and those that creep was pervasive and tenacious, and that a self-consciously vanguard thinker like Meigs saw it as the fundamental adversary to Mitchill’s modern taxonomy. This observation and much evidence in the trial transcripts indicate just how entrenched this vision of nature really was, and suggest that it has not been given adequate attention by most histories of natural history. It would be worth revisiting the emergence and reception of synthetic taxonomic systems in the eighteenth century with an eye toward understanding how that threefold architecture endured, came under siege, or demanded to be reckoned with. If historians of science interested in natural history want a “Copernican Revolution” around which to bend the narrative of their subject (though I am by no means sure such a thing is needed), the story of the breaking of the Genesical triangle might well serve that function. Whether such an investigation would bear fruit or not, there can be little doubt that the basic divisions staked out by that older system undergo a transformation and appropriation over the period 1750–1850. So, for instance, perhaps the very best way to understand the emergence and resolution of the question “Is a whale a fish?” is less as the history of where to slot a big, strange, and very unusual animal, and more as the history of the appropriation of the word “fish” as a scientific term; indeed, it was only possible to ask this “paradoxical” question when a familiar and humble word was obliged to do duty in an increasingly abstruse and systematic scheme for the natural order.

When William Sampson set down his “accurate report of the case of James Maurice against Samuel Judd,” he chose as the epigram for the pamphlet a shining line penned by his fellow Irishman, the politically active playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan: “Who says a whale’s a bird?” The line appears in Sheridan’s self-conscious 1779 comedy on the world of the theater, The Critic, where it features in an ultra-dreadful pastiche of Ophelia’s mad scene staged helter-skelter for the benefit of a pair of preening critics named “Puff” and “Sneer.”5 It took a character of Sampson’s intellectual breadth (and wicked wit) to dig up so apposite a reference, since he had in his sights not merely the general goofiness of Mitchill’s “new philosophy,” but a very specific element of his taxonomic system. It turns out that among the distinctive revisions Mitchill wrought upon the Linnaean/Cuvierian classifications that he taught at the College of Physicians and Surgeons was an original effort to smooth the apparent discontinuity between his penultimate zoological class, Aves, and the class with which his cycle of lectures climaxed (and terminated), the Mammalia. To this end, Mitchill reconfigured the orders within these adjacent classes so as to place the order of waterbirds (like ducks and coots) last among the Aves, and the order of cetes first among the mammals. The result was, in his view, a pleasing continuity across the taxonomic divide: water-birds took up their place beside the water-beasts, in the greater service of a clear and coherent scala naturae rising smoothly through creation. When read in the context of this fact about Mitchill’s natural history, Sampson’s quip about whale-birds (a quip taken up, as we have seen, by others) must be understood as a dart precisely aimed at a chink in the armor of Mitchill’s system. Because coots and other waterbirds had, notoriously, been treated as fish for the purposes of early modern Catholic regulations for the consumption of meat on Fridays, the notion of a bird-fish already belonged in an established tradition of Protestant mockery of benighted scholastic obscurantism.

This point is worth raising not merely because it brings the last of the trial’s inside jokes into the open, but more importantly for what that joke tells us about problems seen to be central to early-nineteenth-century classification. Anomalous organisms—whales, bats, coots, monkeys, and even human beings—could function both as exceptions to defined groupings, and as links between them; the tension between those treatments exposed vulnerable sutures in the surgical precision of natural history in this period. It would be interesting to understand better how this tension was handled, and to trace how the meanings of continuity and exception changed in the period. Given the significance of these ideas to Darwin’s work at mid-century, there is every reason to think that such an investigation would shed considerable light on later developments.

In these and other ways Maurice v. Judd has provided a sidelong, but, I believe, idiosyncratically panoramic view across the combative field of zoological classification in the period 1750–1850, and has suggested several directions for further work.

Finally, then, what can be made of this case under the third and last rationale for the present study: Maurice v. Judd as an opportunity to assess the place of natural history (and the sciences more generally) both in New York and in the United States as a whole in the early nineteenth century? On the narrower question of the case in the context of the intellectual culture of the city in this period, I have already alluded to the significance of the timing and urban geography of the trial, and underlined the stature of the man called upon to represent the views of the sciences to the jury: Maurice v. Judd took place in the Mayor’s Court in the new City Hall, less than 100 yards from the newly founded New-York Institution of Learned and Scientific Establishments. A member of nearly all those establishments, Mitchill could not but represent this Clintonian “Royal Society,” which, under public patronage, had just brought together at the civic center of the city clubs of well-heeled virtuosi and emergent specialized scientific societies like Mitchill’s Lyceum of Natural History. All of these savants conducted their affairs under the banner of the well-advertised pantheon of science and culture, Scudder’s American Museum, which was right upstairs (and had prominent signage on the façade of the Old Almshouse building).

In his study of “The Role of De Witt Clinton and the Municipal Government in the Development of Cultural Organizations in New York City, 1803–1817,” Kenneth Nodyne uses the founding of the New-York Institution to argue that 1817 represented an annus mirabilis in the cultural and intellectual life of the city.6 As the city’s dispersed learned and scientific communities took up residence in the nascent Institution, and as Governor Clinton—flush with the promise of the Erie Canal that he was steering to legislative ratification—presided there (as “His Excellency”) over extravagantly formal meetings of the Literary and Philosophical Society, and as Mitchill’s energetic new Lyceum of Natural History came into being and staked out its turf in the same edifice, there seemed to be reason to celebrate the dawn of a new era in the relationship between science and society in the state of New York.⁷ But, as Nodyne and others have shown, the optimism was to be short-lived. Clinton, Pintard, and their allies were, in the end, unable to secure the passage of “an Act for the encouragement of the New-York Institution for the promotion of the Arts and Sciences” through the Albany assembly in 1818–1819; there would be no ten-year excise tax on tavern licenses to underwrite the activities of minerology and zoology at the Old Almshouse. While a host of factors conspired to delay and finally sink the bill (including the highly personal animosity of the anti-Clintonians—particularly the virulent energies of Gulian C. Verplanck), a rising tone of general dismay met the New-York Institution in 1818 and 1819, reinforced by increasingly loud echoes of some of the early complaints about the whole project. From the start some New Yorkers had expressed irritation that the dilapidated almshouse had not been leveled, and the valuable lots sold off for public benefit. In the process Warren Street could have been opened to through-traffic, relieving the congestion around the political heart of the city. Others had pointed to the fact that, spruced up and converted into offices, the same building could have afforded the city thousands of dollars of income on a regular basis.8 Support for a “Royal Society” in New York clearly met considerable popular resistance from a population steeped in Swiftian satires on gouty Sir Joseph Banks and his clownish coterie of FRSs who primped and preened in the decadent London original of Clinton’s Gotham ambitions.⁹ Who would choose to reproduce such an establishment in the young Republic? Why? In March of 1818, the National Advocate for the Country complained explicitly of the clique of prominent citizens—saliently Mitchill—who seemed to be intent on presiding over a publicly funded playground for self-styled philosophers, and throughout 1819 the New York American repeatedly took shots at the pretensions of Clinton and his gaggle of naturalists, going so far as to publish a mocking transcript of a “philosophical” discussion at the Institution, in which Mitchill’s taxonomic preoccupation with “tails” was the occasion of much low humor.¹⁰

By 1819, in short, the outpouring of derisive scorn for the Institution, Mitchill, and Clinton had reached scandalous proportions. In that year Fitz-Greene Halleck would publish his long poem about the social life of New York, “Fanny,” which would take its swipes at Mitchill and the other philosophers-on-the-dole in the city. For instance, Halleck called for everyone to

Bless the hour the Corporation took it
Into their heads to give the rich in brains

The worn-out mansion of the poor in pocket,
Once the “Old Almshouse,” now a school of wisdom

Sacred to Scudder’s shells and Dr. Griscom.11

And Halleck went on to promise, tauntingly, that all the ancient philosophers of Athens would have a thing or two to learn from a visit to the virtuosi of New York:

In short, in every thing we far outshine them—
Art, science, taste, talent; and a stroll
Thro’ this enlightened city would refine’em
More than ten year’s hard study of the whole
Their genius has produced of rich and rare—
God bless the Corporation and the Mayor!¹²

Just how deeply such paeans were steeped in sarcasm is made clear by more vicious commentaries of the Croaker in the same period: for instance, the ode “To Quackery” (dedicated to “thou patroness of knaves and fools”), which complained of “charlatans” like Hosack, Mitchill, and Clinton, who continuously conspired to brew up “some strange melange / Of scientific Salmagundi.” The poem went on to picture an unholy alliance of politician-naturalist and his philosopher-muse:

Clinton! The name my fancy fires,

I see him with a sages [sic] look,

Exhausting nature and whole quires

Of foolscap—in his wondrous book!

Columbia’s genius hovers o’er him

Fair science, smiling, lingers near,

Encyclopedias lie before him,

And Mitchill whispers in his ear.¹³

And the viciously anti-Clinton poem by the Croaker from about the same time, entitled “The Modern Hydra” (which, like “To Quackery,” was never published, but circulated in manuscript), lambasted the governor for transmuting his stymied political ambitions into scientific showmanship, since, no sooner had his enemies “tomahawk’d his head political” than “straight from the bleeding trunk out slid his / well fill’d noddle scientifical.”14 An exercise of Herculean cauterization was emphatically the city’s only hope.

In a way, this was exactly what happened. By 1827 public support for the New-York Institution would begin to be withdrawn, and Clinton’s death the next year further eroded its constituency. By 1831, the year of Mitchill’s passing, the Old Almshouse had been cleared of its freeloading philosophical tenants and the building converted into administrative offices servicing the municipality. Several of the constituent societies failed, and Scudder’s Museum, divorced from the matrix of Mitchill’s Lyceum and the other institutions of natural history, began its slip into the carnival clutches of P. T. Barnum. Confronting this failure of New York’s first formal, public, and centralized institution of intellectual culture, Thomas Bender points to “[t]he failure of elite and fashionable society to justify its intellectual pretensions,” and suggests that the episode must be read in the larger context of the growing cultural divisions in the city in this period. Rather than seeing the collapse as simply a retrograde step in the progress of science in the United States, it is necessary to recognize that the inviability of the New-York Institution reflected the emerging cultural and intellectual ambitions of a rising community of artisans and mechanics, who were seeking support for their own institutions for the advancement of learning (Gideon Lee, interestingly, was a leading figure in this movement). Understood this way, the New-York Institution was simply a model for intellectual culture that had passed its sell-by date, peopled with a patrician class whose sense of entitlement no longer turned the key to the public coffers. By these lights, that the Lyceum survived, morphing over the years into the New York Academy of Sciences, stands as proof that the right kind of institution—more professional, more specialized, not aspiring to embody the nous of Gotham—could indeed endure.¹⁵

To be sure, more than one tremor shook the New-York Institution in the uneasy decade of its active life; everything from the Panic of 1819 to the founding of the New York Mechanic and Scientific Institution and its mouthpiece, the Mechanics’ Gazette, belong on the autopsy report. Moreover, there can be no doubt that the fate of the philosophers of the Old Almshouse was tightly tied to the fortunes of DeWitt Clinton, whose political trajectory declined through the 1820s.16 But I believe the discussion of Maurice v. Judd in this book offers a uniquely early and charged glimpse of the dynamics that would usher the New-York Institution off the green of City Hall Park and into the annals of the (itself suddenly homeless) New-York Historical Society.¹⁷ Bender refers to the mass eviction as the “first formal challenge to elite cultural hegemony” in Manhattan; rightly understood, Maurice v. Judd offers a premonition, even the first salvo of that challenge, since the case saw the Institution’s familiar figurehead take the short walk across the park to visit City Hall as an expert, and return as the laughingstock of the island. In between, he had made no friends among a powerful group of “men of affairs” against whose claims he had testified (some of whom would lead in the creation of parallel institutions of learning that defined themselves in opposition to Mitchill, his kind, and their societies), and he had permitted an irrepressible lawyer-populist, William Sampson, to make a Punch and Judy show of the whole science of natural history, to the delight of the artisans, seamen, and other working people who crowded the gallery of the court. In the showdown between expertise and eloquence, eloquence drew fast and fired straight.¹⁸

So palpable was this shift—from triumphant entrance to ignominious retreat—that Judd’s own lawyers apparently realigned their defense after Mitchill’s departure. Sensing that the doctor’s testimony had not won the day (and in fact might have done damage to their cause), Robert Bogardus began his closing arguments in the trial with nothing less than a disavowal of the whole episode: “gentlemen,” Bogardus announced to the jury concerning the illustrious naturalist, “I did not call him as one upon whose testimony I meant to place the defence of my client, but rather, because it was proposed as a matter of amusement, and I consented, considering that it would be interesting to curiosity to hear what he would say upon a question of so much novelty in a court of justice.” Such disputations among the worthy over trivial questions of natural history might make suitable entertainment for the philanthropic conversazione of the New-York Forum, Bogardus suggested dismissively, but this sort of chat had no place in the grave chambers of City Hall. In brief, Bogardus himself showed natural-historical polemic the door, announcing to the jury, “it will be well understood by you, as it is by the judge who presides, that juries have nothing to do with questions of science, which can only serve to perplex them; much less are the theories of scientific men to be taken as the law of the land, seeing how little philosophers are agreed amongst themselves.” Jumping on the bandwagon of Sampson’s subversive cross-examination, Bogardus went on to declare that men of science ought really play no role in the courts at all, since “you could never bring twelve of them, if empanneled [sic] as a jury, to be unanimous on any one speculative point.” He then launched into a colorful taxonomic reductio of his own, asking the jury whether, if they were asked to determine the scope of an ordinance to inspect “fowl feathers,” they would—on the strength of scientific testimony that an ostrich is rightly placed in the genus “fowl”—permit a hyperactive inspector to stand on guard at military parades, studiously inspecting the plumes of the generals and the ornaments in the ladies’ hats.19 Cheap laughs at the expense of bookish systematics had, by the trial’s end, crossed the aisle.

This strategic about-face offers striking evidence of just how badly Mitchill and science were seen to fare on the stand; and while it is possible to see Bogardus’s repositioning as merely a tactical maneuver in a two-pronged defense offered by Judd’s lawyers at the close of the trial (with Price making a closing statement that appealed to the jury on behalf of Mitchill’s stature, and Bogardus providing an analysis in the alternative aimed at those jurors unpersuaded by the doctor’s natural history), it is impossible to deny that Judd’s lawyers decided they needed to distance themselves and their case from the testimony of the “Nestor of American Science.” In the process, and in the resulting verdict of Maurice v. Judd, the citizens of New York distanced the Mayor’s Court from the New-York Institution, and fended off what had come to be seen as the encroachment of the philosophers encamped at the gates of City Hall. To declare the whale a fish in 1818 was thus to express serious misgivings about the Clintonian vision of philosopher-kings, installed at the heart of a new Athens on the Hudson.

For clear evidence that such large issues were indeed at play, we need look no further than the final note Sampson appended to his own account of the trial. There, in an incandescent Swiftian parody of Clinton’s Alexandrian projecting (and Mitchill’s Stagerite service to power), Sampson offered a “modest proposal” to the patron of the Erie Canal and the Surgeon General of his militia. Since it appeared that mammalian whales and dolphins were, in the acceptation of philosophers, near cousins to man, it was only a matter of time—and proper initiative—to transform New York into the capital of a cetacean nation. Here was an eminently suitable task for the constituent societies of the New-York Institution:

When it is considered that our waters abound with these dolphins, so inclined by nature to aid and succour us, that the larger kinds are only banished by our cruelty from our shores; and seeing it is well attested that their milk resembles that of cows, with the addition of cream, (see Dr. Brewster’s Cyclop. article Cetology) would it not be worthy the wisdom of our statistical, agricultural, and oeconomical societies, to turn their attention to this weighty consideration, whether these creatures might not by good treatment be induced to lend their aid to the navigation of our waters, and to furnish us in return for our hospitality with abundance of nutrition?20

There was the matter of training these cetes to negotiate fresh water, so they may be “used in our great canals,” but if the canals (wink wink) were dug deep enough and configured just right,

there is no reason … why judges and lawyers, legislators and politicians, office hunters, and lobby-members, may not, before many years, in their attendance upon the terms, enjoy the advantage of a conveyance upon a whale’s back, infinitely surpassing the speed of the steam boat; and the shores of the Wallabout may resound with the music which calls the dolphins to be milked, and be studded with villas where the citizens shall repair to enjoy country air and dolphins’ whey.

And this Georgic depiction of classical splendor on the banks of the Erie Canal could be extended to the heart of the city itself, since “The bay of Goannes seems designed by nature for the reception of the whales; from them will be derived a rich supply of butter and cheese for home consumption and foreign commerce.” Moreover (here mocking Mitchill’s role in the fortification of New York harbor during the preparations for the War of 1812),

Another important acquisition will be the defence and safety of our harbour. If one of Claudius’s gallies was swamped by a single whale, overpowered and stranded as it was, what would the fire of a three decker, or a phlogobombos, avail against an inundation from the snouts of three hundred well disciplined whales? It is evident that the use of fire engines will be superseded.21

Sampson’s fantastic vision—of the philosophers’ whale, trained up by the good ministrations of energetic virtuosi, doing service in the Clintonian canals, while attending the expansion of the Empire State both upstate and outre-mer—conjures a Hogarthian tableau of Maurice v. Judd, and situates it firmly in the broader machinations of New York politics in the period. For all its good fun, this send-up of the eccentric energies of agrarian improvers, nature-nationalists, and society macaronis riding the whales to market makes it abundantly clear that through the trial flowed the strong currents of opposition to the institutions, innovations, and schemes of state-sponsored “philosophy.” Science in the service of the state looked to many New Yorkers suspiciously like the state in the service of the men of science, and while the New-York Institution still shared its triangular lot with City Hall, there would be less traffic across the green in the years to come.

By the summer of 1819, then, when Maurice v. Judd entered into urban legend, the annus mirabilis of New York learned culture was well and truly ended.

If locating Maurice v. Judd in the local geography of New York City permits us to see the ways that the trial was both embedded in, and helped shape, wider debates about science and society in Manhattan, does this study of the case have anything to offer to a still broader consideration of such debates in the early Republic? For starters, we might merely note its surprising reach as “news” in the world of reading Americans at the start of the nineteenth century: not only have I found (without particularly assiduous effort) reports of and allusions to the whale-a-fish case and its aftermath in the newspapers of fifteen of the twenty states that comprised the Union at the time of the trial, I have also turned up additional references in the many papers of Washington, DC, the backwoods presses of Maine (not yet separated from “Old Massachusetts”) and West Virginia (not yet separated from the Commonwealth), and even the irregular columns printed in the remote reaches of the Arkansas Territory.22 For a nation still mostly without a “national culture” this is surprisingly national coverage. Quirky debates over French systematics apparently made good copy in these years, suggesting broad curiosity about the order of nature in the young United States.

Moreover, while extrapolations from so peculiar an incident must be hedged about with qualifications, I believe, as I suggested in the introduction, that this detailed discussion of Maurice v. Judd invites us to raise a warning flag beside a dominant theme in the extensive literature that treats the larger meanings and uses of natural history in the United States across the first half of the nineteenth century. At issue is the preoccupation of a considerable number of commentators with the role of natural history collecting, taxonomy, nomenclature, and the display of naturalia in the “constitution” of what Perry Miller called “nature’s nation.”²³ For Paul Semonin, Christopher Looby, David Scofield Wilson, and others, a reading of the works of Jefferson, the Peales, the Bartrams, Catesby, and the whole canon of American authors attentive to the flora and fauna of the continent provides strong evidence for a distinctively “American” use of natural history in the codification, delineation, and articulation of national ambitions. From the practical to the symbolic, from ornithology to paleontology, from Lewis and Clark to Cole’s The Course of Empire, we are reminded that Americans forged a particular kind of link between natural history and nationalism, and used the language of nature to narrate their nation, to call it into being.24 For Wilson, an intangible “American spirit” whispers in such texts: he hears Jonathan Carver speak a language tellingly unlike that of Captain Cook, and senses in James Bartram’s attention to his vegetables a “fellow human presence lending continuity to American culture as it stretches from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century, and the twentieth.”²⁵ Laura Rigal zeros in on taxonomy itself, and imaginatively figures the ordinary American at the dawn of the Republic as a kind of new Adam, a copy of Linnaeus at the ready: “With the Systema Naturae in hand, any provincial farmer or mechanic had access to a global organizational system through which all plants (and, eventually, insects, birds, and quadrupeds) emerged into visibility and knowability, precisely as if, at the moment of their creation, they had been stamped with a species identity by some original Author of all being.”²⁶ It could have been like that, except, as we have now seen, it wasn’t like that at all: the laboring folk we have met in this book thought Linnaeus mostly absurd, and they had their own ideas about how to organize the natural world, ideas derived from labor, craft, scripture, and experience.

Nevertheless, for all the extravagance of these kinds of claims (and the historical misprisions they not infrequently reflect), it cannot be denied that late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century American naturalists often justified their activities in patriotic language, and many of them—including Mitchill, as we have seen—expressed genuine enthusiasm for using the scientific study of nature to bring profit and autonomy to American enterprises; in the process, American science itself would grow increasingly independent, something Mitchill regularly declared a national desideratum.27 In addition, it seems very likely that, as Looby argues in “The Constitution of Nature,” natural history played a privileged role in the early Republic at least in part because it provided a powerful tool with which to confront the greatest peril in the formative years of an American nationality: “the threat of social disintegration that was posed by the conflicting racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, sectional, local, and ideological categories of self-definition and social loyalty that were inhibiting the formation of a genuinely national identity.”²⁸ A properly conceived and executed natural history of American nature might thus afford American citizens the shared “universal language” they so needed, and provide an integrative inventory of the new nation: an expansive and legible catalogue of a continent of particulars; a centrifugal enumeration always held in focus by the centripetal forces of word and mind.

Appealing as this account may be, and whatever truth it may capture, this foray into the cacophonous theater of Maurice v. Judd has I hope been a salutary reminder that the language of natural history was not impervious to the tug of disintegrative interests. On the contrary, as we have seen, the language of taxonomy could be used without difficulty to articulate sectarian division, and the nomenclature of nature could be held both to secrete and to unmask conflicting identities: in the end, the Yankee whale had no business in a Knickerbocker court. Calling nature’s nation into being with the incantations of natural history could be, when the curtain fell, a very uncertain affair.

 

EPILOGUE: WHALES AND FISH, PHILOSOPHERS AND HISTORIANS, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

Philosophy, in her turn, studies these beings. She goes both less deep and deeper than science. She does not dissect them; rather, she meditates upon them. Where the scalpel has been at work, she sets in with the hypothesis …

VICTOR HUGO, Les Travailleurs de la Mer29

Are whales fish? Today every schoolchild knows the answer: of course not. For this reason most modern readers, shuffling the dusty documentation of Maurice v. Judd, would be sorely tempted to see the case as a conflict between right and wrong, sincerity and expediency, hero and villain. While this is very much the story I have worked not to tell, it cannot be denied that Mitchill has about him the promising air of the scientific martyr, since he stood up for the truth in the face of snickering opposition. By these lights, insouciant Sampson, while likable enough, must play the role of the irresponsible sophist (some might even like to make him the patron saint of strong-program constructivists and their radical science-studies epigones). He attacked science and he won, and the costs turned out to be higher than he probably expected. Should he have known better? Perhaps. Maybe it all seemed like good fun when it was merely about ichthy-whatever. When, in the end, it turned out to be about the status of science itself in New York, about the proper relationship between natural history and social order in the young Republic, did Sampson feel a pang of regret for the damage that had been done? Perhaps. That orange file fish forwarded to Mitchill in the autumn of 1819 may indeed have been freighted with remorse.

It must be said, though, that the drama Sampson staged—the one that pitches society against science (or vice versa)—has been written and rewritten over the last five hundred years, and it always seems to draw a crowd: from Galileo’s travails to those of Lysenko, from Scopes to intelligent design. For some, retelling these stories provides the occasion for parables about how societies must become “more scientific” (the people must be better educated, scientists must be granted a greater role in political life); told differently, the same stories become for others warnings against insidious technocracies and scientific megalomaniacs (there is a proper sphere for science, and it is not to be defined by scientists). But it is in forgetting the stories, I want to suggest in closing, that the real work gets done.

In a 1999 essay entitled “Are Whales Fish?” the distinguished philosopher of science John Dupré took up a long-running philosophical argument concerning the relationship between ordinary language classification of living creatures and their formal scientific arrangement.30 Should we expect “folkbiological” categories to converge with scientifically recognized kinds?³¹ Are there good reasons for this to occur, or do instances of this phenomenon in the history of language-use reflect the unwarranted capitulation of perfectly real and operational taxonomies to inappropriately privileged classifications that have been elevated on the rising tide of a general “scientism”?³² For Dupré, who advocates a “pluralistic view of biological classification” as part of a more general commitment to a “promiscuous realism” (which he situates in the middle of the slippery slope between essentialist and constructivist stances), there is no reason to expect folk classifications to be merely “first approximations” of taxonomic groups that can be more clearly delineated by scientists.³³ As he puts it, “[s]cientific classifications … are driven by specific, if often purely epistemic, purposes, and there is nothing fundamentally distinguishing such purposes from the more mundane rationales underlying folk classifications.”³⁴ Thus it is Dupré’s ongoing project to “claim that folk classifications should be treated on a par with scientific classifications,” since there are consistently “good and obvious reasons for our ordinary language distinctions,” and no clear reason always and immediately to permit narrowly tailored epistemic or genealogical preoccupations to subvert the implicit intentions of ordinary-language categories.35

As his title suggests, Dupré investigates this problem by taking up the question of whether whales, properly speaking, “are” fish. And while he must acknowledge that educated usage among English speakers on the cusp of the third millennium obliges him to concede that they are not, their displacement from the category rankles him, since he can demonstrate that they once were, and he can see no compelling reason why they should have lost that status. After all, neither “whale” nor “fish” is really a proper scientific group: under scrutiny, both turn out to be “biologically arbitrary,” since “whale” is generally taken to mean only the large cetaceans, and must therefore trace an amoeba-shaped region on the textbook evolutionary tree of cetaceans (to grab the large odontocetes like the sperm whale and join them with the mysticetes, while excluding all the smaller dolphins and porpoises), and “fish” is probably the most familiar example of what biologists now call a “paraphyletic” group, since from the perspective of cladistics, the “fish” branch of creation includes all terrestrial vertebrates (which are, in an evolutionary sense, air-breathing lobe-finned fish that took to living on land not very long ago).³⁶ By these lights we’re all fish. This puts Dupré in a position to note: “Given, then, that neither ‘whale’ nor ‘fish’ is really a scientific term, the rationale for the dictum taught religiously to all our children that whales are not fish … is more than a little unclear.”³⁷ He can then extend this observation into an exemplar of the larger philosophical problem he is after: “Indeed, the argument that because whales are mammals they cannot be fish seems to me to be a paradigm for the confusion between scientific and ordinary language biological kinds.”³⁸ Why not mammalian fish?

All of which leaves him with a properly historical question—How did whales become non-fish?—which looms over the normative one that he sets out to answer (Ought they have done so?). As a philosopher, Dupré has a taste for conjectural history, and thus he puts aside an actual “historical study of the usage” and allows himself an historical hypothesis: “For want of a better explanation, I conclude that the exclusion of whales from the category of fish developed as a response to greater scientific knowledge of the nature of whales, which was, as I have argued, a somewhat misguided response.”

I would like to offer this book as an extended argument for the proposition that there is no substitute for actually doing the history. For while one might indeed speculate that whales ceased to be fish because of some general post-Enlightenment fawning over scientific expertise (however relevant or justified), a close look at how whales actually became non-fish in New York in the early nineteenth century has told a very different story: in fact what happened then and there was that scientific expertise took a terribly public bloody nose, and whales ceased to count as fish because of the behind-the-scenes legislative lobbying by a clique of oil merchants and chandlers, who managed to tweak the relevant statute right out from under public opinion, judicial scrutiny, and a jury verdict. By the time it was over “science” had been sent to the wings by all concerned.

The larger point is this: there is little reason to think we can reach reliable answers to the normative questions philosophers rightly like to ask and answer, without real and careful attention to the historical questions on which those answers often subtly hinge. For instance, “scientism” may have its explanatory functions, but we would do well to resist the ready temptation to call on it to do too much historical work, since it is a blunt instrument with which to investigate the complex relationship between science and society.

But perhaps this point is merely an instance of the kind of reciprocal and iterative rug-pulling that too often marks the exchanges between historians and philosophers. Is it possible to hope for something more? Maybe. As Simon Schaffer and others have recently argued, we do not simply need histories of philosophical problems and their solutions (nor do we want a blanket insistence that such problems would somehow be better solved historically), but rather we must seek philosophically informed histories of the examples, instances, and objects that philosophers have settled on, nurtured, and mobilized in making their arguments—histories, in other words, that refuse to let the history and the philosophy, the past and the present, the concrete and the abstract, fall neatly into their fixed cubbies in the taxonomy of the world and the intellect, but that instead show that taxonomy aborning. So Schaffer asks, for instance, how did “soap bubbles” meander back and forth between the domains of vanitas metaphysics and fluid mechanics, becoming the iconic objects of late-Victorian popular science, and later serving to exemplify certain privileged forms of evidence and rationality?39 Histories like these, which insist that the instruments of abstraction are concrete, and that concrete instruments are simultaneously abstract, knit new connections between historical and philosophical investigation.⁴⁰

In the case of the whale-fish it is possible to recover the elements of such a philosophical history, since Maurice v. Judd in fact lived a secret life in the nineteenth century as a philosophical exemplum, as a privileged problem for the consideration of scientific language and its place in social life. Though Dupré is not aware of it, his investigation of the relationship between science and society by means of the history of whales and fish itself has a history.

It would appear that the polymathic William Whewell—author of the massive History of the Inductive Sciences, custodian of the legacies of Bacon and Newton at Trinity College, Cambridge, and himself a common ancestor of historians and philosophers of science—came across the description of the case of Maurice v. Judd in his (English) edition of the Règne Animal when he was at work on the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), the two-volume “lesson” to be gleaned from his ranging and exhaustive History.⁴¹ In volume 1 of that philosophical treatise, enumerating (in Baconian style) “Aphorisms Concerning the Language of Science,” Whewell revisited the fact pattern of Maurice v. Judd in consideration of the principle that “Terms must be constructed and appropriated so as to be fitted to enunciate simply and clearly true general propositions” (Aphorism VIII):

The Nomenclature which answers the purposes of Natural History is a systematic nomenclature…. But we may remark that the Aphorism now before us governs the use of words, not in science only, but in common language also. Are we to apply the name of fish to animals of the whale kind? The answer is determined by our present rule: we are to do so, or not, accordingly as we can best express true propositions.

This analysis led Whewell to offer what amounted to a philosophical ratification of the verdict in Maurice v.Judd, while rejecting any suggestion that ordinary language ought to submit to the razor of comparative anatomy:

If we are speaking of the internal structure and physiology of the animal, we must not call them fish; for in these respects they deviate widely from the fishes: they have warm blood, and produce and suckle their young as land quadrupeds do. But this would not prevent our speaking of the whale-fishery, and calling such animals fish on all occasion connected with this employment; for the relations thus arising depend upon the animal’s living in the water, and being caught in a manner similar to other fishes. A plea that human laws which mention fish do not apply to whales, would be rejected at once by an intelligent judge.42

Later in the same volume, characterizing the “idea of likeness” that governs the proper use of language, and that serves for him as the organizing principle of the classificatory sciences (here rejecting the notion that observed “kinds” are really only properly thought of as the product of exhaustive “definitions,” and instead working toward the idea that a particular “type” gives shape to a group by means of “likeness”), Whewell again returns to the whale-fish problem, using it again to defend the plural domains within which the concept of likeness may work, even when a given term is thereby forced to lead multiple lives:

The terms with which we are here most concerned are names of classes of natural objects; and when we say that the principle and the limit of such names are their use in expressing propositions concerning the classes, it is clear that much will depend on the kind of propositions which we mainly have to express: and that the same name may have different limits, according to the purpose we have in view. For example, is the whale properly included in the general term fish?

And again the answer is made to depend on context:

When men are concerned in catching marine animals, the main features of the process are the same however the animals may differ; hence whales are classed with fishes, and we speak of the whale-fishery. But if we look at the analogies of organization, we find that, according to these, the whale is clearly not a fish, but a beast, (confining this term, for the sake of distinctness, to suckling beasts or mammals). In Natural History, therefore, the whale is not included among fish.43

For Whewell, then, the difference between the whale-fish and the non-fish-whale was the difference between the community of seamen and the community of naturalists, and (like Dupré, albeit for very different reasons) he displayed no particular taste for a convergence of usage, since the word “fish” was being used in each arena in such a way as to express true propositions, and thus the principle at stake—“that the condition of the use of terms is the possibility of general, intelligible, consistent assertions”—was fully satisfied at sea, in the courts, and at the Muséum.⁴⁴

Whewell’s effort to exemplify the proper operation of name-giving and category formation by means of a discussion of how to parse whales, fish, and men immediately fell under the scrutiny of one of his closest readers, John Stuart Mill, who framed his System of Logic of 1843 as an extensive (if admiring) critique of Whewell’s ideas about induction and the methods of scientific reasoning.45 In discussing “classification, as subsidiary to induction,” Mill himself took up the question of how different kinds of people might preoccupy themselves with different “kinds”:

[T]he classification of objects should follow those of their properties which indicate not only the most numerous, but also the most important peculiarities. What is here meant by importance? It has reference to the particular end in view: and the same objects, therefore, may admit with propriety of several different classifications. Each science or art forms its classifications of things according to the properties which fall within its special cognizance, or of which it must take account in order to accomplish its peculiar practical ends.

An acknowledgment that led to what might appear to be a version of the “pluralistic view of biological classification”:

A farmer does not divide plants, like a botanist, into dicotyledonous and monocotyledonous, but into useful plants and weeds. A geologist divides fossils, not, like a zoologist, into families corresponding to those of living species, but into fossils of the secondary and of the tertiary periods, above the coal and below the coal, & c. Whales are or are not fish, according to the purpose for which we are considering them.⁴⁶

Mill even went on to quote in full Whewell’s paragraph on this last issue, concluding with the observation that a judge might well deploy the fisherman’s signification of “fish” when interpreting a law about whaling.47

But Mill appears to have been less certain about the long-term virtues of such pluralism and the “promiscuity” it encouraged. Turning from Whewell’s example of whale-mammals in comparative anatomy and whale-fish on the high seas, Mill recalled the distinctiveness and privileged significance of approaching whales or other objects “not for any special practical end, but for the sake of extending our knowledge of the whole of their properties and relations.” In this special exercise what came to the fore were those “most important attributes” which “contribute most, either by themselves or by their effects, to render the things like one another, and unlike other things.” By paying attention to those characteristics of objects “which would most impress the attention of a spectator who knew all their properties but was not specially interested in any,” the true philosopher of nature could discover the attributes “which fill, as it were, the largest space in their existence,” and thus mark out the classes properly called “natural groups.”⁴⁸ Hence he who approached a whale with no particular end in mind stood the best chance of grasping the nature of whales, and thus of offering a truly scientific classification of organic nature based on the true principles of rational classification. In the process it would become possible to make good inductions about the membership of classes so constructed.49

Moreover, for Mill, the virtues of this indifferently-interested view and the system it engendered recommended broader application. The principles on evidence in natural history taxonomy, he explained, “are applicable to all cases in which mankind are called upon to bring the various parts of any extensive subject into mental coördination,” and therefore they “are as much to the point when objects are to be classed for the purposes of art or business, as for those of science.” Indeed, “[t]he proper arrangement, for example, of a code of laws, depends upon the same scientific conditions as the classifications in natural history; nor could there be a better preparatory discipline for that important function, than the study of the principles of a natural arrangement, not only in the abstract, but in their actual application to the class of phenomena for which they were first elaborated.”⁵⁰

Here was an argument that would make Mitchill the tutor in the Mayor’s Court, and thereby entail the resolution of the social conflict of Maurice v. Judd not in the Swamp, or in Albany, or anywhere on the Atlantic shores or the waters that washed them, but rather on the chessboard of natural historical classification, an even surface mysteriously raised above the world of mere people and places. It was the argument soundly rejected in New York in 1818. But in the end, it may be the argument that has won.

Traced into the filiations of philosophical citation, the afterlife of Maurice v. Judd is revealed to have been the occasion of reflection not merely on whales and fish, but on the proper relationship between zoology and law, science and society.51 Could a judge rightly consider a whale a fish for the purpose of statutory interpretation? Perhaps, but that same judge would do well to study the Règne Animal (strangely) in order to learn the proper basis for his judgment concerning categories, and thereby to practice the exercise of right reason. Need the folk taxonomies of labor and the market converge with the classifications of natural history? Perhaps not, though the essence of a natural class would only ever be revealed by the class of citizens who came to nature with no end in view, and whose view was thereby accorded the final word.

On display in this debate, then, is the operation of the very move that has deeply preoccupied historians of science in the last several decades: the strange phenomenon by which the crisp caesura between science and society is articulated silently, by an ellipsis that stands in the place of forgotten histories. Thus we see an “asocial” knowledge (a knowledge that has no hunger, needs no salary) commandingly define itself in a perpetual sequence of contrasts to socially blinkered views (of whalemen, tanners, chandlers), and in doing so become a socially privileged form of knowledge: austerely asocial as it enters the domain of social conflict, science is promiscuously social in the constitution of its asocial identity. In the process, “science” becomes something to be contrasted with “society,” and becomes at the same time a resource upon which society can rely to solve social problems.

In reflecting on the relationship between history and philosophy, we might hazard a parallel construction, since philosophy can plausibly be seen as austerely ahistorical as it enters the domain of historical debate, but promiscuously historical in the constitution of its ahistorical identity. Thus Dupré attacks the historical question “are whales fish?” careful not to touch the past, even as he is unfolding a philosophical example that has been made philosophical by and through (an elided) history. In the process “philosophy” comes to be distinguished from “history” by a process of erasure not entirely unlike the process by which “science” comes to be distinguished from “society.” Along the way, philosophers and scientists (and indeed, complicitous historians) win themselves sets of tools with which to work upon both the past and the present.

Is a whale a fish? Is science social? Is philosophy historical? The precedent question is always this: What stories must be forgotten to answer these questions?

 

1 This is Ritvo’s phrase, discussing Victorian Britain: Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid, p. 14.

² The episode is recounted in Adrian Desmond and James R. Moore, Darwin (New York: Norton, 1994), p. 45. Darwin himself would later muse about the evolution of whales in the Origin of Species in an imaginative passage that became one of his most memorable “just so” stories about speciation: “In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with a widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.” Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964 [1859]), p. 184. It is a passage that reminds us that “insect” retained well into the nineteenth century its etymologically primary meaning of “an animal divided in-to sect-ions,” and thus remained a common term for the creatures we now call crustaceans. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that by 1859 Darwin could be thoroughly dismissive of the remaining whale-a-fish holdouts: “No one regards the external similarity of a mouse to a shrew, of a dugong to a whale, of a whale to a fish, as of any importance” (On the Origin of Species, p. 414).

³ See Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid, p. 46, for a discussion of this issue.

⁴ H. Meigs to J. Meigs, 2 January 1819, Meigs Papers, New-York Historical Society; emphases in original. The line from Hudibras, which Meigs (mis)cites in his letter, is from canto 2 of part 2, “That Bonum is an animal, made good with stout polemic brawl.” The reference is to the debates among the Stoics over the nature of the good. Butler’s own footnote expands the joke in the direction that interests Meigs: “The same authors are of the opinion, that all ships are fishes while they are afloat; but when they are run on ground, & laid up, in the dock, become ships again.”

⁵ Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Critic, edited by David Crane (London: A. and C. Black, 1989), p. 81.

⁶ Nodyne, “The Role of De Witt Clinton.” This dissertation has served as the most important source for most of the other secondary treatments of this episode.

⁷ On DeWitt Clinton’s (much disputed) scientific identity, see: Vivian Hopkins, “The Empire State: De Witt Clinton’s Laboratory,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 59, no. 1 (1975), pp. 7–44; and Jonathan Harris, “De Witt Clinton as Naturalist,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 56, no. 4 (October 1972), pp. 265–284.

⁸ For a summary of these positions, see “New-York Institution,” American Monthly Magazine and Critical Review, 1, no. 4 (1817), pp. 271–273, at p. 273.

⁹ Such satires were well known. See, for instance, Gulian C. Verplanck, The State Triumvirate, A Political Tale (New York: For the Author, 1819).

¹⁰ It would seem that this was a double joke, playing both on Mitchill’s concern about the “Bucktails” (the anti-Clintonian political faction) and his odd ideas about zoology. See “A Literary and Scientific Conversation at the Hall of the Philosophical Society of Gotham,” American, 23 November 1819, p. 2. See also “To the Author of Dick Shift,” American, 30 October 1819, p. 2, which jeered the juxtaposition of Clinton and Newton reportedly on display in the portrait gallery of the New-York Institution. (NB: The American began publishing in March of 1819.) For the complaints of the National Advocate for the Country, see Nodyne, “The Role of De Witt Clinton,” p. 176.

¹¹ Fitz-Greene Halleck, Fanny (New York: C. Wiley, 1819), section 68.

¹² Ibid., section 48.

¹³ This poem appears in Drake, The Croakers, pp. 129–131.

¹⁴ Ibid., pp. 112–113.

¹⁵ I am here summarizing the arguments made by Bender in chapter 2, “Patricians and Artisans,” of New York Intellect, particularly pp. 76–81. See also Cornog, The Birth of Empire, pp. 65–69.

¹⁶ On the Mechanic and Scientific Institution (of which Gideon Lee was founding vice-president), see: Wilentz, Chants Democratic, pp. 40–42; Bender, New York Intellect, pp. 78–88.

¹⁷ In this sense, Maurice v. Judd merits consideration in relation to the themes raised in Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund, and Andrew Mendelsohn, eds., Science and the City. Osiris, 2nd series, 18 (2003). See also Arnold Thackray, “Natural Knowledge in Cultural Context: The Manchester Model,” American Historical Review 79, no. 3 (1974), pp. 672–709.

¹⁸ Or was it, to be more precise, a showdown between eloquent expertise (Mitchill) and an expert at eloquence (Sampson)? I was struck by the comment of one reader of this manuscript, Anthony Grafton, who saw in the exchanges of Maurice v. Judd a rhetorical contest deeply informed by the classical tradition (then entering its last years of undisputed dominance within university culture in the United States). This observation emphasizes the extent to which Mitchill and Sampson shared a formation in the Greek and Roman arts of disputation, and deployed those skills in the course of the trial right along with their knowledge of ichthyology. More work on the relationship between this sort of civic humanism (fundamentally at odds in many respects with the very idea of expertise) and the emerging ideal of the scientific expert would certainly shed additional light on the development of the sciences in the early Republic. For a superb introduction to the culture of oratory and debate in American higher education in this period, see James McLachlan, “The Choice of Hercules: American Student Societies in the Early 19th Century,” in The University in Society, edited by Lawrence Stone (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), vol. 1, pp. 449–494. On classical rhetoric in the early Republic, see Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), chapters 1 and 2. More generally, Thomas Bender, ed., The University and the City: From Medieval Origins to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), particularly chapter 9, by Louise L. Stevenson (“Preparing for Public Life: The Collegiate Students at New York University, 1832–1881”).

¹⁹ For the quotes in this paragraph, see IWF, pp. 54 and 56; emphasis mine. The New-York Forum was a discussion group organized by J. H. Hatch, L. Clark, and R. I. Wells, which took on questions like “Are permanent charitable institutions except for the purposes of education beneficial to society?” (debated on 29 March 1819); tickets were sold, and the proceeds benefited, among others, the New-York Sunday School Union Society. The group generally met at the City Hotel on Monday evenings. See American, 27 March 1819, p. 2.

²⁰ IWF, p. 83; question mark added.

²¹ Ibid; question mark added.

²² Much of this was, of course, reprinting of stories from other papers. An exhaustive list is impossible, but here are a few choice references: Winyaw Intelligencer (South Carolina), 30 January 1820, p. 4; Kentucky Reporter, 11 October 1820, p. 1; Arkansas Gazette, 9 September 1820, p. 3; Louisiana Advertiser, 27 July 1820, p. 1; Farmer’s Repository (West Virginia), 20 January 1819, p. 3; Maine Intelligencer, 3 November 1820, p. 52.

²³ The foundational work in this area was William Martin Smallwood, Natural History and the American Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941).

²⁴ The literature here is immense, but a good point of departure is the classic work of Perry Miller, Nature’s Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). While the broad theme has certainly been nuanced by more recent historical work (see in particular Joyce E. Chaplin, “Nature and Nation: Natural History in Context,” in Stuffing Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping Knowledge, edited by Sue Ann Prince [Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003], pp. 74–93), it nevertheless remains a somewhat preformatted thesis available to students in American studies, art history, and the historically oriented literary analysis of American texts. For a sense of where the field has been (and is) on these questions, consider: Semonin, “Nature’s Nation”; idem, American Monster; Ann Shelby Blum, Picturing Nature: American Nineteenth-Century Zoological Illustration (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Pamela Regis, Describing Early America: Bartram, Jefferson, Crèvecoeur, and the Rhetoric of Natural History (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992); and Wilson, In the Presence of Nature.

²⁵ Wilson, In the Presence of Nature, pp. 86 and 122.

²⁶ Rigal, The American Manufactory, p. 5. While I am here singling out a hyperbolic moment in her text, it should be emphasized that this is a book from which there are plenty of things to be learned.

²⁷ Philip Pauly, who is currently at work on a book (on scientific definitions of “native” American flora and fauna) that will shed light on this issue, has already touched on these themes in the first chapter of Biologists and the Promise of American Life, see especially pp. 19–22.

²⁸ Looby, “The Constitution of Nature,” pp. 259–260.

²⁹ Victor Hugo, Les Travailleurs de la Mer (Paris: Gallimard, 1980 [1866]), p. 440.

³⁰ John Dupré, “Are Whales Fish?” in Folkbiology, edited by Scott Atran and Douglas L. Medin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 461–476. For the larger philosophical argument that informs this short piece, see John Dupré, The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Also relevant is idem, “Natural Kinds and Biological Taxa,” Philosophical Review 90, no. 1 (1981), pp. 66–90. My brief discussion below of philosophical approaches to these problems is no substitute for reading the literature with which Dupré is engaged. See, for instance: Carl Gustav Hempel, “Fundamentals of Taxonomy,” chapter 6 of his Aspects of Scientific Explanation, and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (New York: Free Press, 1965); Philip Kitcher, “Species,” Philosophy of Science 51, no. 2 (1984), pp. 308–333; and Elliott Sorber, “Sets, Species, and Evolution: Comments on Philip Kitcher’s ‘Species,’” Philosophy of Science 51, no. 2 (1984), pp. 334–341. A philosophically sensitive historian’s take on some of these issues can be found in Gordon McOuat, “From Cutting Nature at Its Joints to Measuring It: New Kinds and New Kinds of People in Biology,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 32, no. 4 (2001), pp. 613–645.

³¹ For a detailed empirical investigation of this question, see Brent Berlin, Ethnobiological Classification: Principles of Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

³² Dupré himself invokes a misguided scientism: Dupré, “Are Whales Fish?” p. 472.

³³ Ibid., pp. 461 and 472.

³⁴ Ibid., p. 462.

³⁵ Ibid., pp. 462 and 464.

³⁶ Omitting the lobe-finned fish leaves the category of “ray-finned fish,” which is a monophyletic group.

³⁷ Dupré, “Are Whales Fish?” p. 466.

³⁸ Ibid., p. 468.

³⁹ Simon Schaffer, “The Urbanity of Classical Physics: Soap Bubbles, Time Machines and Other Metropolitan Marvels,” Lawrence Stone Visiting Professorship Lecture, Princeton University, 9 December 2003. A shortened version of this paper appears as Simon Schaffer, “A Science Whose Business Is Bursting: Soap Bubbles as Commodities in Classical Physics,” in Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, edited by Lorraine Daston (Cambridge, MA: Zone, 2004). This volume, which takes up a series of what might be called “philosophical objects,” offers several examples of this sort of investigation.

⁴⁰ For a brief discussion of this approach, see Peter L. Galison and D. Graham Burnett, “Einstein, Poincaré, and Modernity,” Daedalus 132, no. 2 (2003), pp. 41–55. For a thoughtful treatment of these problems from a philosopher’s perspective: Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), particularly chapter 1.

⁴¹ On Whewell generally, see Richard Yeo, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

⁴² William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon Their History (London: Parker, 1840), vol. 1, p. lxxv; last emphasis mine. I base my conjecture concerning the origin of Whewell’s interest in this issue on the fact that the discussion of Aphorism VIII begins with a citation of Cuvier, and a precise reference to the Règne Animal, indicating that Whewell was reading in that volume as he composed this section, and making it seem quite likely that he took up the whale/fish question in response to the note on Maurice v. Judd in Griffith’s edition of that work.

⁴³ This and the above quote from Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, vol. 1, p. 456.

⁴⁴ Though only, to be fair, if you did not know much about fishing and whaling, since in point of fact “the main features of the process” of catching these creatures looked nothing alike. For an interesting analysis of the broader set of commitments that informed Whewell’s ideas about scientific nomenclature, see Simon Schaffer, “The History and Geography of the Intellectual World: Whewell’s Politics of Language,” in William Whewell: A Composite Portrait, edited by Menachem Fisch and Simon Schaffer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 201–231. Also useful: Yeo, Defining Science, pp. 106–115. It is worth remembering how important these issues were in the 1830s and 1840s: just a few years later, in 1842, Hugh E. Strickland would deliver, through the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a set of formal Rules of Zoological Nomenclature. For an insightful account of the struggles around this effort (and the implications for ideas about species in the period), see Gordon McOuat, “Cataloguing Power: Delineating ‘Competent Naturalists’ and the Meaning of Species in the British Museum,” British Journal for the History of Science 34 (2001), pp. 1–28. For the later history of these issues: Richard V. Melville, Towards Stability in the Naming of Animals: A History of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, 1985–1995 (London: International Trust for Zoological Nomenclature, 1995).

⁴⁵ At issue was a sharp polemic over the role of induction in the making and assessing of scientific hypotheses. Whether the “Mill-Whewell debate” can best be summarized as a showdown between deductivist (Whewell) and inductivist (Mill) approaches, or as a contest between rival conceptions of induction, remains unresolved among philosophers of science. The proper place of history and logic in the shaping of scientific theories was also clearly at issue. For an introduction to these problems, see: Gerd Buchdahl, “Deductivist versus Inductivist Approaches in the Philosophy of Science as Illustrated by Some Controversies between Whewell and Mill,” in Fisch and Schaffer, William Whewell, pp. 312–344; Laura J. Snyder, “The Mill-Whewell Debate: Much Ado about Induction,” Perspectives on Science 5, no. 2 (1997), pp. 159–198; and John Losee, “Whewell and Mill on the Relation between Philosophy of Science and History of Science,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 14, no. 2 (1983), pp. 113–126. Also useful (particularly for understanding the continuing relevance of the debate in current philosophy of science) is: Peter Achinstein, “Inference to the Best Explanation: Or, Who Won the Mill-Whewell Debate?” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 23, no. 2 (1992), pp. 349–364; this is an essay review of Peter Lipton’s Inference to the Best Explanation (London: Routledge, 1991).

⁴⁶ John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1846), p. 435.

⁴⁷ Both Mill and Whewell were generally interested in the relationship between legal and scientific forms of evidence, and both discuss the ways that judges and advocates reason about decisions. See Katharine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), particularly chapter 1. It is also interesting to note that between the publication of Whewell’s Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences and Mill’s System of Logic, the “Error of Supposing the Whale to Be a Fish” had run in block caps as a title in the Times of London (1 October 1841, p. 7). The occasion was a review of Parley’s Penny Library (London: Cleave, 1841), the first volume of a series of didactic Victorian juvenile novellas by the pseudonymous “Peter Parley,” which devoted an entire chapter (chapter 13, complete with anatomical illustrations) to the domestic scene of a dutiful father disabusing his children (and wife) of their confusion about the taxonomic status of the cetaceans. It is striking to consider that, in the end, the origin of the “dictum taught religiously to all our children that whales are not fish” (Dupré, “Are Whales Fish?” p. 466) may well have as much to do with the rise of Victorian hackwork journalism as with the rise of comparative anatomy (after all, one of the leading nineteenth-century spokesmen for systematic taxonomy, Whewell, would have been perfectly happy with Melville’s definition of the whale: “a spouting fish with a horizontal tail”). This would confirm the importance of seeing “popular” and “professional” science in the Victorian period as reciprocally constituted to a surprising degree. See: Bernard Lightman, ed., Victorian Science in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); and James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

⁴⁸ This and the above quotes from: Mill, A System of Logic, p. 436; emphasis mine.

⁴⁹ It is here that this “other” Mill-Whewell debate (about the proper basis for taxonomy, and the propriety of pluralism in nomenclature) intersects with the Mill-Whewell debate more familiar to the philosophers. Induction and deduction alike require meaningful sets upon which to operate, and the making of meaningful sets is the business of classification. Where classification is concerned, Mill and Whewell ultimately divide, it seems to me, on the question of whether a “Natural group” is best given by a “type” (Whewell) or by a “definition” (Mill). A slightly different terminology might contrast “family resemblance” categories (though it could be argued that Whewell thinks of his types more like Platonic forms) with those derived from an enumeration of characteristics. The latter approach, which Mill borrows from Comte, inclines toward algorithmic processes, the former toward something like connoisseurship. The contrast is, I think, instructive in considering the larger implications of Mill’s and Whewell’s ideas about the proper relationship between science and society, but I must leave it to the real philosophers of science to play out whether more attention to this issue would shift accounts of the Mill-Whewell debate over induction itself.

⁵⁰ Mill, A System of Logic, p. 447.

⁵¹ Nor did things come to an end with Whewell and Mill: Thomas Henry Huxley, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, returned to the whale-fish problem when he needed to explain what “philosophical” anatomy was, and what it meant to grasp the “totality” of “resemblances” (see Huxley, “Owen’s Position in the History of Anatomical Science”). William Henry Flower, Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum, not only wrote about why whales were not fish, but also played out the legal implications of this fact in a lecture to the Royal Colonial Institute in 1895. And, as proof that history unfolds according to its own mysterious cycles, in 1919, almost a century to the day after Maurice v. Judd, the American zoologist Frederic A. Lucas, director of the American Museum of Natural History, was called to give testimony before the Board of Appraisers in New York City to “show why a whale was not a fish”—it appears that an American whaling company was trying to avoid paying a duty on whale meat as a “fish product.” See Lucas to Harmer, 10 March 1919, Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, MS 1284/2, Falkland Islands Committee, Correspondence.