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... University of California Press. I am now a proud owner of a Wilkins First Edition and I'm counting on all the rest of you to make him a famous author in hopes that someday my copy, carefully guarded, will be worth a bundle.

But even if that does not eventuate, there is much to gain:

This is an essay in the history of ideas (although I prefer the term conceptual history), and in particular of the ideas that came before and might be demonstrated or fairly thought to have contributed to the ideas in play in biological thought about species and classification. "History of Ideas" has become uncommon and somewhat disparaged by professional historians, and this is understandable given the whiggish, presentist bias much of it has exhibited. I am well aware of the problems faced by the historian of ideas, as described by John Greene ... "Of all histories the history of ideas is the most difficult and elusive. Unlike things, ideas cannot be handled, weighed, and measured, They exert a powerful force in human history, but a force difficult to estimate."

Based on a decade of Wilkins watching, if there is someone who can take the measure of ideas and their weight upon history, it's John ... and what more inestimable wealth could anyone hope for?

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P.S. Wilkins, for no discernible reason, referred me to this quote re his book:

Who, too deep for his hearers, still went on refining.
And thought of convincing while they thought of dining;
Though equal to all things, for all things unfit;
Too nice for a statesman, too proud for a wit.

Oliver Goldsmith, "Retaliation"

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