In Moby-Dick, Ishmael declares, "Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that a whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me." With this statement, Melville's protagonist takes sides in one of the great controversies of the early nineteenth century - one that ultimately had to be resolved in the courts of New York City.
In Trying Leviathan, a 2007 New York City Book Award winner, D. Graham Burnett recovers the striking 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. Falling in the middle of the century between Linnaeus and Darwin, the trial dramatized a revolutionary period that saw radical transformations in the understanding of the natural world.
The New York Times says, Trying Leviathan isn't just another fish story....[H]is story is riveting, one of those wonderful obscure microcosmic matters.
D. Graham Burnett is associate professor of history at Princeton University,
where he recently held the Christian Gauss Preceptorship and directed the Program in History of Science. He studied history and philosophy of science
at Cambridge University on a Marshall Scholarship and was a member of
Trinity College. He has taught at Yale and Columbia universities, and serves
on the board of directors of the Vermillion Sea Foundation. His books include
Masters of All They Surveyed and
A Trial By Jury.
