The Whale Goes to Court

inspection was necessary because it was whale oil, and whales were not fish. The state disagreed, and so a date was set for a court to decide not a question of law, but the answer to a more fundamental question: Is a whale a fish? As simple as that question may appear today, the answer was far from obvious in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, the public debate in New York sparked off by the trial was sensational. At stake was nothing less than what most regarded as the order of nature. According to the commonly accepted scheme of things, if an animal was not a beast or a bird, it was a fish, regardless of whether it breathed air or suckled its young. For as long as anyone could remember, all non-human creatures had been organized according to the categories of birds, beasts, or fish. For the average person, the answer seemed perfectly obvious: whales swam in the sea and therefore they were fish. Against this traditional framework stood the new Linnaean system of classification, which sought to introduce more scientific values into the classification of living things. Barely half a century old in 1818, the Linnaean system controversially classified whales as mammals because they shared two mammalian characteristics: they…