6. When Thomas Jefferson Stood Up for the Honor of American Animals
Thomas Jefferson was a prickly man. Few things brought out his prickly side when he served as US ambassador to France more than slights, real or imagined, directed towards America. Count Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon, a prominent eighteenth century French naturalist and author of Historie Naturelle, a science encyclopedia, annoyed Jefferson. Buffon concocted the Theory of New World Degeneration, which held that North America was a marshy continent recently emerged from the sea. As the count claimed, excessive moisture made the continent’s plants and wildlife inferior to, smaller, and more delicate than those of Europe. Moreover, argued Buffon, if plants or animals were transported from Europe to America, the poor environment would cause them to degenerate smaller and less virile sizes.
It was a dumb take by a man who had never been to the New World. Scientifically speaking, it was silly gibberish. It should have elicited no more than a scornful chuckle and a shrug. However, that is not how Jefferson handled it. Buffon’s diss of North America’s mega fauna seriously ticked off Jefferson, and he decided to disprove the count’s theory. He went to great lengths to win the argument. Jefferson saw Buffon’s take as an insult to America and its potential greatness. So he set out to challenge the Frenchman with evidence of American bigness. For starters, he wrote friends back home, and asked them to measure the size of American animals. As seen below, he did not stop there.
