Here lies poor Artedi, in foreign land pyx'd / Not a man nor a fish, but something betwixt, / Not a man, for his life amongst fishes he past, / Not a fish, for he perished by water at last.

Based on a Latin epitaph by Anders Celsius, Shaw’s English translation was inscribed on the back flyleaf of Carl Linnaeus’s copy of Peter Artedi’s work Ichthyologica. Artedi, a Swedish naturalist known as the “father of ichthyology”, fell into a canal in Amsterdam and drowned.