Gulliver's TravelsJonathan Swift

Swift published Gulliver's Travels in 1726 as the travel memoir of a ship's surgeon who survives four disasters at sea and returns each time with a report on a nation of strangers. Lilliput reduces European politics to a quarrel over which end of an egg to crack and a court that awards office by rope-dancing. Brobdingnag reverses the scale. Gulliver, now the miniature, recites the constitution and recent wars of England to a giant king, who concludes that the bulk of Gulliver's countrymen are the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the earth.

The third voyage lands at Laputa and the Academy of Lagado, where projectors extract sunbeams from cucumbers while the fields below go untilled, and at Glubbdubdrib, where the summoned dead correct the histories written about them. The fourth sets the Houyhnhnms, horses governed wholly by reason, against the Yahoos, human animals stripped down to appetite. Gulliver goes home unable to bear the smell of his own family.

Swift told Pope he had built the book on the proof that man is not a rational animal but an animal merely capable of reason. That distinction is why the Travels surfaces wherever the tradition tries to fix the boundary between man and beast, and why Adler cites it under Animal, Man, Reasoning, Custom and Convention, Government, War and Peace, and Science alike. Satire here does the work of a definition by refusing the definition everyone had assumed.