I’m about halfway through Harriet Ritvo’s The Platypus and the Mermaid, a book recommended to me by Chris Locke‘s sister Liz. It’s about the 19th Century’s obsession with taxonomies, and it’s staggeringly good. Ritvo is one of those authors whose breadth of knowledge and grasp of details seems impossible. She shows how naturalists and culture struggled with the concept of species, with the naturalness or artificiality of order, with whether order is simple or complx, with the discovery of a continent’s worth of new animals (kangaroos looked a lot like greyhounds) by not only following the scientific debate but by attending to how children’s guides to animals explained themselves. And she’s a good writer to boot. Thanks, Liz! [Technorati tags: taxonomy EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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