Cover of Trying Leviathan

Trying Leviathan

by D. Graham Burnett

2007 304 pages eng

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 stat…

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