le’s imaginations because the whole thing was so paradoxical,” said Burnett, an associate professor who specializes in the history of science. “There was broad consensus in the early republic that whales were fish — the notion this could be questioned, and by ‘philoso-phers’ of all people, struck nearly everyone as preposterous. There was much merriment at the expense of men of learning.”
The trial became a media sensation akin to the O.J. Simpson trial, with breathless coverage in newspapers, galleries crammed with citizen onlookers and celebrity figures engaged on both sides. William Sampson, the star plaintiff’s lawyer, and Samuel Latham Mitchill, a well-known naturalist, were “the Johnnie Cochran and Stephen Jay Gould of the day,” Burnett said.
Burnett stumbled on an account of the trial several years ago while researching the place of science in “Moby-Dick.” The case was such fertile ground for exploring changing perceptions of scientific knowledge that he ended up making the trial the focus of his study. He expanded the scope to examine the larger problems in the understanding of natural order that arose from the time of the pioneering 18th-century taxonomist Carl Linnaeus to Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary biology. Princeton University Press published the book last October.
Associate professor of history D. Graham Burnett is the author of a new book that examines the debate over whale taxonomy as a turning point for the history of science in early America. (photo: Denise Applewhite)
“Controversies afford unique windows into knowledge being made,” said Burnett, who has taught at Princeton since 2001. “The agonistic setting of the courtroom obliges people not just to say what they know, but to defend it under cross-examination — to explain where they got their information and what buttresses it. You see down into the activities of science and the features of people’s relationship to the natural world, which are generally so difficult for the historian to recover.”
The trial also served as a moment in history when book learning was challenged by knowledge gained from life experience. Fisherman, whalers and craftsmen who worked with whale products testified alongside trained zoologists and comparative anatomists. Burnett also studied whalers’ logbooks at the New Bedford Whaling Museum to examine what whalemen knew about the anatomy and physiology of whales.
“It’s an interesting example of lay expertise,” Burnett said. “In what ways do people come to know nature through labor? It’s not the same kind of knowledge as in the university discipline of zoology or in academies of natural history, but there is deep expertise in the craft knowledge of those whose livelihoods necessitate intimate contact with nature.”
In March “Trying Leviathan” was selected as one of two recipients of the 2007 New York City Book Award from the New York Society Library, which recognizes books that capture the essence of New York City.
“Graham Burnett’s book is a terrific achievement,” said Anthony Grafton, the Henry Putnam University Professor of History. “He draws on an amazing range of sources, but wears his learning very lightly, writing an elegant and witty prose that anyone could read for pleasure. I love the way he tells the story of his central case, Maurice v. Judd, but I’m even more impressed by the way he uses the story to help us understand the meanings of law and science in a very different world. It’s wonderful to see scholarship of this depth and originality presented so well.”
Burnett graduated from Princeton in 1993 and went to the University of Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar, completing his Ph.D. in 1997. He taught at Yale University and was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Columbia University and a fellow in the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library before joining the Princeton faculty.
His first book, “Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography and a British El Dorado,” examined the relationship between cartography and colonialism in the 19th century. He also wrote “A Trial By