SubjectTrying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature
Softcover | 2010 | #184094 | ISBN-13: 9780691146157
NHBS Price:
£15.95
| $25/€20 approx.
Hardcover | 2007 | #172103 | ISBN-13: 9780691129501
NHBS Price:
£34.95
| $55/€44 approx.
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In Trying Leviathan, D. Graham Burnett recovers the strange story of Maurice v. Judd, an 1818 trial that pitted the new sciences of taxonomy against the then-popular - and biblically sanctioned - view that the whale was a fish. The immediate dispute was mundane: whether whale oil was fish oil and therefore subject to state inspection. But the trial fueled a sensational public debate in which nothing less than the order of nature - and how we know it - was at stake.
Burnett vividly re-creates the trial, during which a parade of experts - pea-coated whalemen, pompous philosophers, Jacobin lawyers - took the witness stand, brandishing books, drawings, and anatomical reports, and telling tall tales from whaling voyages.
Burnett vividly re-creates the trial, during which a parade of experts - pea-coated whalemen, pompous philosophers, Jacobin lawyers - took the witness stand, brandishing books, drawings, and anatomical reports, and telling tall tales from whaling voyages.
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