Doctor Bat’s Ass: Buffon, American Degeneracy, and Cooper’s The Prairie

This essay focuses on how James Fenimore Cooper’s third Leather-Stocking novel, The Prairie (1827), serves as a rebuttal to George-Louis Leclerc, Count de Buffon’s theory of American degeneracy, which asserted that the American climate and lush vegetation Created an environment that reduced the size and vitality of its mammals, including humans. Cooper, in this tale of violence and loss in an ethereal Great Plains landscape, refutes Buffon’s theory by constructing his own myth of an American natural world populated not with Buffon’s diminutive weaklings but with formidable animals and people who reside in a harsh, dry American prairie. Additionally, by satirizing European modes of biological inquiry via the comic character of Dr. Bat, The Prairie serves as Cooper’s own contradictory volume of natural and social history.