It would be easy for a retrospective historian to look at this trial as one more tired example within the popular opinion versus scientific knowledge narrative. Luckily for us, Burnett has far too deft a touch, and is clearly too careful a thinker, to allow for such reductionist pandering. Rather than attempt to cut through the uncertainty and messiness of the period, with some modern-day dismissal of our naive and ignorant predecessors, Burnett sinks himself into the morass of context, to make us wonder along with everyone else, "what exactly makes a fish a fish?" Was it so settled that scientists thought whales were mammals? What about whalemen? Surely those who had actually grappled with a living beast ought to have their say. As for the common people, even their understandings were not so easily categorized. This final concern was of central importance. For, as the trial closed, it was about the practical application of understandings within the young republic, and how these differed across space, that would decide the fate of leviathan. Maurice v Judd was to become not only a question of classification, but of the placing of science within the politics and policy of the city.
Toward the end of his work Burnett refers to natural history of the period as existing within a "paradigm of confusion" and, indeed, it is the careful elucidation of this paradigm which grounds Trying Leviathan. Certainty and uncertainty rarely fall into such neat classifications. Too frequently we assume to know everything, or nothing. Truly, it is often the case that we have some information, that we move forward tentatively, with uncertainty. Capturing the spirit which animates the tough slog of living gives history a more nuanced, and yes, a more truthful animation. Whether we hail the whale as a brother of Mammalia is about expertise yes, but also about common acceptation, which, like knowledge, is always subject to revision and change. We too are caught in the same morass; overwrought by the same hubbub.
