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Description
Cats is 'dogs', and rabbits is 'dogs', and so's parrots; but this 'ere 'tortis' is a insect, a porter explains to an astonished traveler in a 19th-century Punch cartoon. Railways were not the only British institution to schematize the world. This book aims to capture the fervor of the Victorian age for classifying and categorizing every new specimen, plant or animal, that British explorers and soldiers and sailors brought home. As she depicts a whole complex of competing groups deploying rival schemes and nomenclatures, Harriet Ritvo shows us a society drawing and redrawing its own boundaries and ultimately identifying itself.