The Name of the Beast

Armand Marie Leroi

  • Buffon by Jacques Roger
    Cornell, 492 pp, £39.50, August 1997, ISBN 0 8014 2918 8
  • The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination by Harriet Ritvo
    Harvard, 274 pp, £19.95, November 1997, ISBN 0 674 67357 3

During the second half of the 18th century, the great enterprise of sorting out the biological world was at its most dynamic and magnificent. Empire-builders were sending home animals, indeed entire faunas, of a strangeness that defied traditional taxonomies. Scientifically-minded farmers were calculating pedigrees and codifying breeds in the quest for improved stock; physicians and surgeons were giving names to the apparently infinite congenital abnormalities that came under their not always very skilful care. For men with a taste for the kind of intellectual order that natural history can provide, these were times in which it must have been heaven to be alive.

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