Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America by Lee Alan Dugatkin (review)

78 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America Lee Alan Dugatkin I n Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose, University of Louisville biologist Lee Dugatkin presents an engaging account of a neglected episode in the history of science : the effort by Thomas Jefferson to rebut the theory of degeneration posited by French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon in his sprawling, thirty-six volume Natural History: General and Particular (1749-1788). Buffon claimed that the cold and wet climate of the New World caused the animals that lived there to be stunted, puny, and sexually impotent, reduced the number of species as compared with the Old World, and even affected domesticated animals imported to America from Europe. The only animals that thrived in the Western Hemisphere, according to Buffon, were insects, reptiles, and other “cold-blooded” creatures. Other Europeans extended Buffon’s degeneracy theory to human migrations to the western hemisphere. In 1772, a French clergyman, Abbé Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, made perhaps the most galling claim on behalf of New World degeneracy. In his A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, he famously declared that “one should not be surprised that America has yet to produce a good poet, a clever mathematician, [or] a genius in even one art or science.” A surprising number of prominent early Americans took notice of Buffon’s degeneracy theory. It not only struck at their nationalist pride, but also threatened to undermine the economic viability of the infant Republic by discouraging immigration. That, in addition to Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams took time to dismiss Buffon’s theory testifies to how seriously they took the theory ’s challenge to the United States. In 1786, for example, Madison drafted a table comparing the American weasel to its European counterpart at the same time he rallied support for what became the Constitutional Convention. In 1785, Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, made the most sustained rebuttal. Dugatkin casts this scientific dispute as a dire threat to American national security. Jefferson “understood the very survival of the United States of America rested in part” on immigration (59). In Query VI, Jefferson attacked the theory of New World degeneracy, systematically rebutting Buffon’s claims. While minister to France, he planned personally to present Buffon with tangible proof of the Book Reviews BOOK REVIEWS SPRING 2011 79 size, strength, and vigor of American animals in the form of a gigantic moose. Jefferson worked assiduously for three years to procure such a specimen to demonstrate that the moose was not merely a reindeer or a deer as European naturalists had claimed. Jefferson believed that if he could procure the skeleton and skin of a large moose, Buffon would concede that New World degeneracy did not apply to animals. A year later, when Jefferson received word that a seven-foot specimen had been killed in Vermont, at great expense he had its remains preserved and shipped to France. When it arrived in September 1786, Jefferson immediately presented the moose to the Count, claiming that it “convinced Mr. Buffon. He promised in his next volume to set these things right.” (Exactly what Buffon had been convinced of and what he promised to rectify are unclear.) Buffon never managed to do so. Six months after examining Jefferson’s moose and before he published another volume of his Natural History, the then eightyyear -old died. Dugatkin argues convincingly that Buffon would certainly have understood that the moose was a separate species, but thinks it unlikely Buffon was about to repudiate the entire theory of degeneracy (100). More likely, he would have qualified his theory to account for anomalies—for example, by conceding that degeneration did not apply to North American mammals, which he in fact did in 1778 in his fifth “supplement” to Natural History—while still maintaining that its general thrust applied in all other cases. Joseph Priestley chose this path in defense of phlogiston theory at the same time. Dugtakin overstates the threat posed to the United States by Buffon’s theory, but he clarifies obscure...