No matter what it has, it arguably is lacking some of what it should have as a specimen of its type, and it certainly lacks what other things not of its kind possess.
But what is most interesting about the flag-raising image is that it was a specimen of popular art, that it was not a painting or a statue.
Ripley collected a new subspecies of babbler on this jaunt, named it Actinodura egertoni lewisi, or Lewis's bar-winged babbler, and presented a stuffed specimen of it to Lewis, who gave it a place on the mantelpiece in his Walpole library at Farmington, Connecticut, where he occasionally contemplates it with mixed feelings.
If we are indeed surrounded by cultural ruin, then Hitchens is a fine specimen of it: one of those manic preachers who have been shouting so long that they can no longer hear any voice apart from their own.
"Spartacus," about the fabled slave revolt, is a specimen of socialist realism, and it shows all the stupidities endemic to that style — notably, overemphasis.
And when the same analysis was applied to a specimen of the older Archaeopteryx, it too failed to make the grade.
A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 8th edition by Eric Partridge, edited by Paul Beale 1,400pp, Routledge, £25 Once, "slang" was itself slang - a specimen of the very thing that it described.
It's a specimen of managed democracy.
In fact, it's a specimen of the "double bullshit" news story: one load of bullshit used to prop up a second load of bullshit.
We homogenised a specimen of each tonsil pair and screened it with both enzyme immunoassays.
