THE PLATYPUS AND THE MERMAID AND OTHER FIGMENTS OF THE CLASSIFYING IMAGINATION

#### THE PLATYPUS AND THE MERMAID AND OTHER FIGMENTS OF THE CLASSIFYING IMAGINATION.

By Harriet Ritvo. Harvard Univ. Press. 304 pages. $29.95

In 1735, when Carl von Linné (a.k.a. Linnaeus) published his Systema Naturae— in which he coined the term Homo sapiens—he described some 300 animal species. A century and a half later, with naval expeditions routinely carting new zoological specimens back from overseas, British taxonomists struggled to identify more than a thousand new genera each year, a number that a contemporary commentator deemed "simply appalling." Classifying these legions of creatures became a principal occupation of Great Britain’s naturalists.

Not every new discovery slid easily into existing categories. In 1770 the crew of Captain James Cook’s Endeavour reported coming across an Australian animal "as large as a grey hound, of a mouse colour and very swift," which "jumped like a Hare" on two legs, "making vast bounds." And what to make of the amphibious, egg-laying mammal with webbed feet that seemed to have "the beak of a Duck engrafted on the head of a quadruped"? The British met the challenges: by 1804, the kangaroo (the name was borrowed from an Aboriginal language) had been declared "a most elegant animal," fit to be included in the royal menagerie; and by 1851, stuffed platypuses were appearing alongside rabbits and squirrels in British museum displays.

In The Platypus and the Mermaid, Ritvo, a historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is less interested in kangaroos and platypuses than in the principles undergirding Victorian taxonomy. She contends that "the classification of animals, like that of any group of significant objects, is apt to tell as much about the classifiers as about the classified." The fact that British naturalists earnestly placed Homo Europaeus Britannici at the pinnacle of their taxonomic system speaks volumes, of course.

But, as Ritvo demonstrates at length, naturalists were not alone in their solemn categorizing. Farmers, hunters, butchers, and breeders all developed distinct systems of their own for organizing the natural world. Hunters, for example, "classified game according to the kind and degree of amusement it offered." This anthropocentrism and general penchant for classification help explain the Victorian fascination with whatever deviated from neat definitions and distinctions, including "monstrous" human anomalies (missing limbs, Siamese twins, dwarfs), hybrids (mules, children of mixed races), and imaginary creatures (mermaids, sea monsters).

Ritvo draws a staggering amount of anecdotal detail into The Platypus and the Mermaid, enough to convince any reader of the Victorian era’s compulsion for classification. It’s a virtuoso display, but the book doesn’t offer much of an argument. Ritvo’s goal is simply and topically "to represent the range of these taxonomic practices." One can, of course, draw one’s own conclusions from this taxonomy of the taxonomists, but further ruminations from the author, who has led readers to anticipate learning "as much about the classifiers as about the classified," would have been welcome.

—Toby Lester