This example suggests that cancelable properties are sufficient conditions for recognition (such as scratching a match to produce combustion), while indelible properties are seen as necessary conditions (there can be no combustion in the absence of oxygen). The difference is that in physics or chemistry we can ascertain experimentally which conditions are really necessary, while in our case the necessity of these conditions depends on many perceptual and cultural factors. It seems intuitive that an animal designed by nature without a trunk is no longer what we have decided to call an elephant.
And what if nature had designed a rhinoceros without horns? I think we would have to assign it to another species and call it by another name, for the sake of etymology if nothing else. And yet I suspect that we would be more indulgent and flexible over the matter of the rhinoceros than that of the elephant. So much so, that while the Indian rhinoceros ( Rhinoceros unicornis, probably the species Marco Polo saw) has only one horn, the African rhino (Diceros bicornis, in fact) has two. And yet, for anybody who is not a zoologist or a hunter, while the elephant’s trunk is crucial, the rhinoceros’s horns count for much less.
The recognition of a property as indelible depends on the history of our perceptual experiences. The zebra’s stripes strike us as indelible properties, but it would be sufficient if evolution had produced breeds of horse or ass with striped coats; the stripes would become all too cancelable, because we would have shifted our attention to some other characterizing feature. And perhaps the same thing would happen in a universe in which all quadrupeds had trunks. In that case—perhaps—the elephant’s tusks would become indelible.
An entire iconography in the cinema and in books convinced us that feather headdresses were an indelible property for the recognition of an American Indian; and then along came John Ford, who in Stagecoach had the iconographic courage to have Geronimo and his braves suddenly appear on the heights of the bluff without feathers, and the entire cinema audience was on the edge of their seats waiting for the attack on the stagecoach after having recognized the redskins (in a black-and-white film) perfectly well.
We might say that Ford had probably identified other indelible features that basically determined our CT: painted cheeks, that gritty impassiveness, the gaze, who knows.8 However, he managed to convince us by constructing a context (a network of intertextual references and a system of expectations capable of rendering some physiognomic features, and the position on the heights, and the presence of a certain type of weapons and clothing) that was more relevant than the presence of the feathers. That it is the context that establishes the relevant properties has already been pointed out in Eco (1979 and 1994). I therefore agree with Violi (1997, 9.2.1. and 10.3.3.) when in the end she assigns the function of selecting the indelible properties to the contexts. The essential properties therefore become the ones that we must know about if, in a certain context, we wish to keep the discourse open, and that can be denied only on pain of renegotiating the meaning of the terms we are using.
On occasion the context can be common to an epoch and a culture, and it is only in such cases that dictionary properties, which refer to the way in which that culture has classified the objects it knows, seem indelible. But even then things often proceed in a complex way, accompanied by many coups de théâtre. Which is all reconfirmed for us by what the reader has probably been waiting for for some time, and that is the real story of the platypus.
4.5 The Real Story of the Platypus9
4.5.1 Water Mole or Duck-Billed Platypus
In 1798, a naturalist called Dobson sent the British Museum a stuffed animal that the Australian colonists called the “water mole” or “duck-billed platypus.” From an account published by Collins in 1802,10 a similar animal had been found in November 1797 on the shores of a lake near Hawkesbury. It was the size of a mole, with little eyes; the front feet had four claws and were united by a membrane larger than the one that united the claws of the hind feet. It had a tail and the beak of a duck; it swam with its feet, which it also used to dig out its lair. It was certainly an amphibian type. Collins’s text was accompanied by a most inaccurate drawing: the animal looks more like a seal, a whale, or a dolphin, as if, knowing that it swam, the artist had applied the generic CT of a marine animal to it at first sight. Or perhaps the source is another. According to Gould (1991: 19), in the course of a voyage to Australia in 1793, Captain Bligh (of Bounty fame) had discovered (and eaten, roasted, with gusto) an echidna. Now we know that the echidna is cousin germane to the platypus, with whom it shares the privilege of being a MONOTREME. Bligh drew it with great care, and the drawing was published in 1802. It looks very like Collins’s platypus. I don’t know if Collins had seen Bligh’s drawing or not, but if he had seen it, so much the better. The conclusion would seem to be that both artists caught some common generic features of two different animals at the expense of specific features (Collins’s platypus does not have a convincing beak and seems more suited for eating ants, like the echidna).
Let’s get back to the stuffed platypus, which reached London and was described in 1799 by George Shaw as Platypus anatinus.11 Shaw (who was able to examine only the skin, not the internal organs) betrayed various signs of amazement and puzzlement: at first he thought a duck’s beak had been grafted onto the head of a quadruped. The use of “graft” was no accident. The skin had arrived after crossing the Indian Ocean, and it was known at the time that certain diabolical Chinese taxidermists were extremely good at grafting, for example, fish tails onto monkeys’ bodies in order to create mermaidlike monsters. Shaw therefore had some reason to opine at first that he was faced with a bogus creature made by artificial means, but he later admitted he could find no sign of fraud. His reaction is interesting: the animal was unknown; he had no way of recognizing it, and he would have preferred to believe it did not exist. But since he was a man of science, he went on. And right from the start he swithered between Dictionary and Encyclopedia.
In order to understand what was before his eyes, he tried right away to classify it: the platypus seemed to him to represent a new and singular genus that, in the Linnaean organization of the QUADRUPEDS, should be placed in the order of the BRUTA alongside the order of the MYRMECOPHAGA. After that, he left the categories and moved on to properties. He described the shape of the body, the fur, tail, beak, spur, color, size (13 inches), feet, jaw, and nostrils. He found no teeth and noted that the tongue of his exemplar was missing. He saw something that seemed like eyes to him, but they were too small, and there was too much fur over them to make for good vision, which was why he thought they were like a mole’s eyes. He said they might have been suited to aquatic life and surmised that the creature fed on water plants and animals.
He quoted Buffon: Everything that is possible for Nature to produce, has in fact been produced.
In 1800, Shaw again took up the description, with renewed doubts and hesitation, as he did not dare include the animal among the QUADRUPEDS.12 He said he had news of another two specimens sent by the governor of New Holland, Hunter, to Joseph Banks, which ought to have dispelled all suspicion of fraud. These specimens (and it seems that Hunter had sent another to the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society) were later described by Bewick in an addendum to the fourth edition of his General History of Quadrupeds (Newcastle: Berwick, 1824) as a unique animal with the triple nature of a fish, a bird, and a quadruped … Bewick’s view was that it ought not to be collocated according to the standard methods of classification, but that it was sufficient to provide a description of these curious animals exactly as they were when he received them. And although this is followed by a picture entitled “An amphibious animal,” we can see that Bewick refused to classify it as FISH, BIRD, or QUADRUPED, although he identified morphological features of fish, birds, and quadrupeds.
Finally exemplars complete with internal organs began to arrive preserved in alcohol. But still in 1800 the German Blumenbach received another stuffed specimen (he was to have two in alcohol only the following year), and he named it Ornithorhynchus paradoxus. The choice of adjective is curious; it does not correspond to taxonomic usage; it tells us that Blumenbach was trying to categorize something as uncategorizable. After him the name Ornithorhynchus anatinus was to prevail (and we should note that this is a dictionary name, but one that depends on an encyclopedic description, since it means “with a bird’s beak similar to that of a duck”).
In 1802, the specimens in alcohol (male and female) that Blumenbach had also seen were described by Home,13 who also said that the animal did not swim on the surface but came up for air, like the turtle. Since he was
