The History of the Humanities and the History of Science in the Early Natural History of the Kangaroo

This paper focuses on a 1778 public lecture by the Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper to tie together elements of Stephen Gaukroger’s intellectual legacy with some of the author’s personal memories. Camper, like Gaukroger, was sensitive to the fruitful relationships of the humanities and the sciences and sought to bring a philological reconstruction of a passage from Plutarch into conversation with debates in the 1770s and 1780s about how best to classify the Australian kangaroo within existing taxonomical systems.