Review: October 2009

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According to Wikipedia, an adult male moose measures six to seven feet tall at the shoulder and weighs as much as fifteen hundred pounds, making it second only to the bison as the largest land animal in North America. But when the curator of France’s Royal Botanical Gardens, Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon, was compiling his influential Histoire Naturelle, published in thirty-six volumes between 1749 and 1788, information about moose was not a mouse click away.

Naturalists such as Buffon relied on two primary sources of information: specimens that survived the rigors of a transatlantic voyage, and accounts of traveling naturalists, most of whom were amateurs. Unaware of how fragmentary and misleading that evidence was, Buffon proclaimed that the New World was naturally “degenerate.” It had no beasts as large as an elephant nor as noble as a lion, and where similar creatures existed on both sides of the Atlantic, the American species were smaller, weaker, and less energetic—largely as a result of the debilitating atmosphere they lived in. Even the Indians were a degenerate form of humans: slow-witted, unemotional, and sexually stunted. To French readers, that was a congenial notion. They’d known in their hearts that Europeans were superior; Buffon assured them that this was a law of nature.

Citizens of the newly liberated United States, however, read Buffon with astonishment. They might laugh at his inaccuracies, but they were also politically outraged. The notion that theirs was anything but a land of wealth and opportunity was not only false, but was also harmful to the nation’s social and commercial development. Alexander Hamilton, in The Federalist Papers, mocked the Europeans for suggesting “that even dogs ceased to bark after having breathed awhile in our atmosphere.” James Madison, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin attacked Buffon and his followers in numerous letters and articles, and Thomas Jefferson devoted a major part of his Notes on the State of Virginia to establishing the falsity of the degeneracy theory. The founding fathers may have seen it as a matter of getting the science right, but from a twenty-first-century viewpoint, it seems like the first round of a European–American culture war that still surfaces from time to time in battles over Big Macs in Paris and “Freedom Fries” in the Congressional cafeteria.

Where does the moose come in? According to Lee Alan Dugatkin, a professor of biology at the University of Louisville, Jefferson conceived the notion of sending a specimen of a moose to Buffon, hoping that it would provide clear proof that America’s creatures were every bit as large and vigorous as Europe’s. And he succeeded, with the help of correspondents in New England, who arranged to kill a moose in Vermont, cart it to the coast, and ship its skeleton and skin to Paris, where it arrived around October 1, 1787. Unfortunately, Buffon died within little more than a year of the moose, writing nothing more on the subject, so we will never know if he was convinced of the error of his ways.