1. Harriet Ritvo, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2005, is Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of “The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age” (1987) and “The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination” (1997); the coeditor of “Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Imperialism, Exoticism” (1991); and the editor of Charles Darwin's “The Variation of...