The Platypus and the Mermaid: And Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination

by Harriet Ritvo

Overview

"Cats is 'dogs,' and rabbits is 'dogs,' and so's parrots; but this ‘ere 'tortis' is a insect," a porter explains to an astonished traveler in a nineteenth-century Punch cartoon. Railways were not the only British institution to schematize the world. This enormously entertaining book captures the fervor of the Victorian age for classifying and categorizing every new specimen, plant or animal, that British explorers and soldiers and sailors brought home. As she depicts a whole complex of competing groups deploying rival schemes and nomenclatures, Harriet Ritvo shows us a society drawing and redrawing its own boundaries and ultimately identifying itself.

The experts (whether calling themselves naturalists, zoologists, or comparative anatomists) agreed on their superior authority if nothing else, but the laymen had their say—and Ritvo shows us a world in which butchers and artists, farmers and showmen vied to impose order on the wild profusion of nature. Sometimes assumptions or preoccupations overlapped; sometimes open disagreement or hostility emerged, exposing fissures in the social fabric or contested cultural territory. Of the greatest interest were creatures that confounded or crossed established categories; in the discussions provoked by these mishaps, monstrosities, and hybrids we can see ideas about human society—about the sexual proclivities of women, for instance, or the imagined hierarchy of nations and races.

A thoroughly absorbing account of taxonomy—as zoological classification and as anthropological study—The Platypus and the Mermaid offers a new perspective on the constantly shifting, ever suggestive interactions of scientific lore, cultural ideas, and the popular imagination.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674673588
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	10/15/1998
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	308
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Harriet Ritvo is Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Point of Order

Flesh Made Word

Barring the Cross

Out of Bounds

Matters of Taste

Notes

Acknowledgments

Illustration Credits

Index

Editorial Reviews

[An] engaging, offbeat book...The Platypus and the Mermaid is a study of a wide range of classificatory practices in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, and Ritvo is particularly interested in the interplay between learned and popular writing...I have thoroughly enjoyed Ritvo's entertaining and informative tour of both the highroads and the hedgerows of natural history.

Stefan Collini

Ritvo's study of 18th- and 19th- century British taxonomic practices is premised on the belief—repeatedly espoused by anthropologists—that classification of important objects such as animals can reveal as much about the classifiers as about the classified. The way we order the world reflects how we think about it...This book provides an extremely rich and detailed collection of vignettes illustrating the many ways that Victorian thought of animals, making for thought-provoking and entertaining reading.

Science - Sherrie Lyons

This racy, erudite study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century taxonomy reminds us that classification reveals at least as much about the classifiers as the classified. Moving deftly from the practice and language of science towards popular attitudes, The Platypus and the Mermaid takes on hybrids, monsters, freaks and culinary choice...[It] offers a highly entertaining account of the interactions of science and culture [and] is a compelling reminder of the politics and prejudice that fired the classifying imagination.

Times Literary Supplement - Angelique Richardson

Like a dimsum restaurant, The Platypus and the Mermaid offers an enormous variety of tidbits...The reviews in the world's two leading weeklies of science both agreed...that [Ritvo's] is an entertaining and enormously informative book. I can only join the chorus.

International Zoo News [UK] - Herman Reichenbach

[Ritvo's] learning is wide and unusual, her book a bran tub stuffed with obscure authors and diverse beliefs, where science mingles with prejudice, and sense with silliness...The huge range of out-of-the-way evidence that Ritvo brings to bear on her theme is impressive and absorbing...[The book] explores the fascinating question of how far we shape language to fit our behavior and how far language shapes us.

New York Review of Books - Richard Jenkyns

In The Platypus and the Mermaid, Harriet Ritvo explores some of the motives, reasonable and otherside, underlying British classifications of animals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...Anybody who reads it will be fascinated by all the curiosities Ritvo has assembled...[Her] book is worth reading for its erudition and charm and for her perceptive observations on the social and political motives embedded in the scientific doctrines she surveys.

Natural History - Matt Cartmill

[An] entertaining and often hilarious story of how 19th-century scientists and philosophers tried to come to terms with the complex problem of classifying living things...The subject is of enduring interest and the book is the first I have encountered that deals with it so thoroughly and accurately.

Times Higher Education Supplement - Harry Miller

Harriet Ritvo's theme is classification, but in the vernacular tradition rather than the classically biological. Her knowledge is prodigious, and she is not afraid to speak out on arcane topics...Ritvo has written an authoritative and compelling book filled with often bizarre and sometimes macabre accounts of how humans divide up their world. Every statement and quotation has full references in the end notes to the pages and her erudition should make this an essential classic for all those interested in the wider issues of taxonomy.

New Scientist - Juliet Clutton-Brock

Like a dimsum restaurant, The Platypus and the Mermaid offers an enormous variety of tidbits...The reviews in the world's two leading weeklies of science both agreed...that [Ritvo's] is an entertaining and enormously informative book. I can only join the chorus.
— Herman Reichenbach

International Zoo News [UK]

Ritvo's study of 18th- and 19th- century British taxonomic practices is premised on the belief—repeatedly espoused by anthropologists—that classification of important objects such as animals can reveal as much about the classifiers as about the classified. The way we order the world reflects how we think about it...This book provides an extremely rich and detailed collection of vignettes illustrating the many ways that Victorian thought of animals, making for thought-provoking and entertaining reading.
— Sherrie Lyons

Science

Harriet Ritvo's theme is classification, but in the vernacular tradition rather than the classically biological. Her knowledge is prodigious, and she is not afraid to speak out on arcane topics...Ritvo has written an authoritative and compelling book filled with often bizarre and sometimes macabre accounts of how humans divide up their world. Every statement and quotation has full references in the end notes to the pages and her erudition should make this an essential classic for all those interested in the wider issues of taxonomy.
— Juliet Clutton-Brock

New Scientist

In The Platypus and the Mermaid, Harriet Ritvo explores some of the motives, reasonable and otherside, underlying British classifications of animals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...Anybody who reads it will be fascinated by all the curiosities Ritvo has assembled...[Her] book is worth reading for its erudition and charm and for her perceptive observations on the social and political motives embedded in the scientific doctrines she surveys.
— Matt Cartmill

Natural History

This racy, erudite study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century taxonomy reminds us that classification reveals at least as much about the classifiers as the classified. Moving deftly from the practice and language of science towards popular attitudes, The Platypus and the Mermaid takes on hybrids, monsters, freaks and culinary choice...[It] offers a highly entertaining account of the interactions of science and culture [and] is a compelling reminder of the politics and prejudice that fired the classifying imagination.
— Angelique Richardson

Times Literary Supplement

[An] entertaining and often hilarious story of how 19th-century scientists and philosophers tried to come to terms with the complex problem of classifying living things...The subject is of enduring interest and the book is the first I have encountered that deals with it so thoroughly and accurately.
— Harry Miller

Times Higher Education Supplement

[Ritvo's] learning is wide and unusual, her book a bran tub stuffed with obscure authors and diverse beliefs, where science mingles with prejudice, and sense with silliness...The huge range of out-of-the-way evidence that Ritvo brings to bear on her theme is impressive and absorbing...[The book] explores the fascinating question of how far we shape language to fit our behavior and how far language shapes us.
— Richard Jenkyns

New York Review of Books

[An] engaging, offbeat book...The Platypus and the Mermaid is a study of a wide range of classificatory practices in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, and Ritvo is particularly interested in the interplay between learned and popular writing...I have thoroughly enjoyed Ritvo's entertaining and informative tour of both the highroads and the hedgerows of natural history.
— Stefan Collini

New York Times Book Review

An account of taxonomy as zoological classification and as anthropological study which offers a perspective on the constantly shifting interactions of scientific lore, cultural ideas, and the popular imagination. Ritvo shows how laymen and experts vied to classify and categorize every new specimen of plant or animal, and what the resulting controversies sometimes revealed about human society -- for example, the sexual proclivities of women, or the imagined hierarchy of nations and races.

Booknews

This wide-ranging study of the 'heroic age of scientific classification' attempts—with only partial success—to place the taxonomic advances and prejudices of 18th- and 19th-century England in a broader cultural context. MIT historian Ritvo (The Animal Estate) first analyzes the politics and 'broader allegiances' that clouded the objectivity of zoologists who embraced the gargantuan task of ordering the biological world, even as British imperialism was rapidly expanding their knowledge of that world. The author exhaustively details the unprofessional behavior scientists resorted to for personal gain (such as needlessly inventing new species and naming them after their employers). Then she expands her definition of taxonomy to include the informal classification of animals by amateur naturalists, groups with specialized relationships to animals (like farmers, breeders, hunters, and pet owners), and the general meat-eating public. Ritvo persuasively argues that 'each of the ways . . . people imagined, discussed, and treated animals inevitably implied some taxonomic structure.' Her analysis of how British sportsmen classified wild animals as game or vermin points to a more fundamental and still-prevalent assumption that nature exists solely for human entertainment. Similarly, her analysis of the conflicts between hunters, farmers, and pet owners over the proper role of wild animals describes a cultural battle yet raging. Too often, though, Ritvo shies away from social analysis with a sense of propriety rivaling that of her Victorian subjects. Her introduction notes that 'worries about the concupiscence of human females structured the theory and practice of animal breeding';in the text these worries are mentioned only briefly, and Victorian attitudes about female sexuality are dodged entirely. This hit-and-miss social commentary, combined with a penchant for inflated academic language (allayed only slightly by period cartoons), sabotages Ritvo's goal of illuminating the cultural ramifications of Enlightenment zoology.

Kirkus Reviews