The story of Thomas Jefferson and the very large moose has been told before. Lee Alan Dugatkin, however, presents this episode in its historical and scientific context in a short and lively volume, with appropriate scholarly paraphernalia. Dugatkin is a professor of Biology at the University of Louisville and amply qualified for this undertaking. He has written a delightful book; it would make an excellent gift. The University of Chicago Press deserves to be commended for publishing it.
The founding of America presented the Old World with challenges ranging from the economic, political, and military to the ideological and even the scientific. Among European men of learning, a theory arose that America was a degenerate land - damp, coolish, and capable of producing only weak, undersized, insipid life forms lacking in vigor or fertility. Even Native Americans, so the notion had it, were barely fecund, with withered genitalia and little passion or love for one another. Like so much of what was then considered scientific knowledge, the theory of degeneracy was the product of speculation and unwarranted extrapolations from wild tales comparable to today's stories of alien abductions and the like. One champion of degeneracy, e.g., claimed Native Americans shaped their children's heads into squares and cones, and that Louisiana was the home of frogs that weighed 37 pounds and sounded more like calves than frogs. Thus, for centuries, people believed such notions as that the Earth was the center of the universe, even though there was no accurate evidence to support them. Religions were erected on authoritarian teachings and it became a matter of faith and dogma to believe things about the natural world that no reliable empirical data supported.
The theory of degeneracy posed a threat to the newly-established United States: if only bugs and reptiles (like 37-pound frogs) could thrive here, who would want to emigrate from the Old World and risk all in such an unpromising and inhospitable land? America would be seen as an empty hope. It would be isolated, its cities would languish and shrink. Perhaps eventually America would even die out. What makes this story so interesting is that degeneracy's most redoubtable champion was none other than George-Luis Leclerc, Count Buffon, one of the leading naturalists of the day and author of the exhaustively written, widely-read and highly-regarded 36-volume treatise, "Natural History: General and Particular." His principal opponent, moreover, was none other than Thomas Jefferson, francophile and passionate naturalist, whose only book, "Notes on the State of Virginia," was in part a painstaking response to the degeneracy theory and a defense of the vitality and fertility of the New World. As a true Enlightenment thinker, Jefferson marshaled empirical data to demonstrate that, if anything, the New World was warmer, more fertile, and enjoyed more vitality among its flora and fauna than the Old. He determined to refute Buffon and force him to retract his views. But besides the written evidence he assembled, he wanted concrete, dramatic proof. To that end, he requested a large male moose from contacts in the United States, observing to Buffon that a European reindeer could simply walk underneath a beast of such stature. Eventually, a hunting party was raised in Vermont and slew a male moose seven feet tall. In due course, and with many trials and tribulations, it was dismantled and shipped to Jefferson in France. Buffon apparently saw it set up in all its glory and thereupon declared that he would revise his estimations of the New World. Alas, before he could make good on his word, he died. Within another seventy years, however, degeneracy and its other champions were dead as well. Thus,to paraphrase T.H. Huxley, a beautiful theory was slain by an ugly moose.
One thing that struck me as I finished this book is that there is no mention of Alexis de Tocqueville, even though Dugatkin traces this story to the age of Darwin, Thoreau and Emerson. While Tocqueville's principal focus was on prisons and democracy in America, not nature, I was initially surprised Dugatkin found nothing from or about Tocqueville that would contribute to this story. I looked in three editions of "Democracy in America," Hugh Brogan's biography of Tocqueville, the newly-translated collection of Tocqueville's letters post-1840, and George Pierson's estimable study, "Tocqueville in America"; only in the latter did I find even one reference to Buffon (there were none to de Pauw or Raynal, who also articulated militant versions of the degeneracy theory). Pierson only cites Tocqueville's disagreement with Buffon's assertion that style is the man himself. Tocqueville seems not to have felt it necessary to refute or vindicate any aspect of degeneracy theory. He did grumble about the inadequacies of his cousin Chateaubriand's descriptions of Niagara Falls and America's "vast and interminable" forests, which struck him with wonder. Tocqueville also seems not to have expected Native Americans to be weak and lacking in vitality, or indifferent to their children. In fact, he apparently believed that, based on Chateaubriand's and Fenimore Cooper's descriptions, Native Americans were dignified, well-developed and stately. Tocqueville also tells the story of a family of creole settlers who were visited by a Black woman and a young Native American woman: the Native American woman encountered the settlers' daughter, who was 5 or 6 years of age, and "taking the child in her arms, lavished upon her such fond caresses as mothers give" - he wrote. Thus, a young Native American woman was capable of "lavishing" what a European aristocrat recognized as maternal affection on the child of a stranger - of a different race, no less. Tocqueville also noted the effects of climate, but concluded that America is generally warmer than France and that in the warmest (i.e. Southern) states, the population tends to be less industrious and vigorous than in the colder Northern states. To some extent, this is contrary to what readers of Buffon would have been led to expect. Interestingly, Dugatkin does point out that Charles Darwin apparently expected to find evidence of degeneracy on his travels to the New World aboard the H.M.S. Beagle. I can only surmise that degeneracy theory had little influence on Tocqueville or even that it may have been moribund in France by the time he undertook his trip to the United States.
There is much more to this book than a short review can do justice - as, for example, the roles that men like Lamarck, Kant, Hegel, von Humboldt and even English Romantic poets played in the ongoing debate over whether America really was afflicted by degeneracy. This part of the story is imortant but a bit anticlimactic (things tend to peter out anyway after the moose's eventual appearance in France). Suffice it to say that Dugatkin is a faithful scholar, a master of pertinent materials and sources, who has written a very worthwhile and informative account, of only 129 pages, showing how despite its quaintness and amusing qualities (exemplified by the whimsical picture on the dust jacket), the episode of Mr. Jefferson and the giant moose illuminates the history of our country and the history of science. I heartily recommend this book.
