Jefferson’s Mangy Moosecapade: Fur flies between two eighteenth-century naturalists

Colonial Williamsburg ^ | Spring 2005 | Andrew Gardner

[quidnunc]

Seldom has natural history — the study of bugs, bees, and the entire canvas of God's furry, finned and feathered creatures — prompted international pique. Yet in the heady intellectual world of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, it happened between France and the newly forged republic of the United States of America. Two distinguished scholars took issue with each other's views on what makes the natural world tick, and indulged in a bit of not-so-diplomatic, transatlantic one-upmanship.

Now, fallings out between academics are nothing new, but what makes this particular contretemps fascinating is that in one corner stood America's brilliant, gifted champion Thomas Jefferson. Across the Atlantic, throwing intellectual French punches, was an equally smart and cerebral gentleman — Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Europe's outstanding natural historian. More than 200 years later, some people still fervently believe that enduring French-American bad feelings can be traced to this very disagreement.

The count, who never quite made it to a full five feet in height in his stockings, was prone to a measure of Gallic insensitivity, and possessed the unfortunate ability to rub people the wrong way, particularly Americans.

He was born to wealthy parents in central France on September 7, 1707. His father, Benjamin, was lord of Dijon, and his mother came from a well-heeled line of landowners. With this top-drawer pedigree, the boy was packed off to be educated by the Jesuits at a college in Dijon and later at the University of Angers. Like Jefferson, Leclerc was no intellectual slouch. He was blessed with a mind that in the best Renaissance tradition could productively focus on any topic that took his fancy, from the arts to the sciences. In time the Frenchman set his mind to delving into the widest-ranging subjects imaginable, because George Louis Leclerc had not only intellect but the great good fortune to be in the right place at the right time.

By the mid-1700s, the Enlightenment — also known as the Age of Reason — was sweeping Europe. It would alter the outlook of the continent, and pave the way for the Industrial Revolution. Across Europe, new ideas and theories based on scientific observation were quickly displacing superstition and ignorance. It was an age of investigation . and discovery, an era unparalleled for turning out philosophers, mathematicians, doctors, biologists, physicists, and others of the scientific ilk.

In his time, Leclerc, who only became Count Buffon in 1773, would turn his formidable brain to a wide range of scientific investigation — biology, cosmology, and mathematics, as well as natural history. His interest in the sciences was rewarded by being elected first to the Royal Society in England, and later to the French Academy.

Initially it was in the lofty, esoteric world of mathematics other mortals find so daunting that Leclerc reveled. His application of differential and integral calculus to solve a particular theoretical problem even today goes under the name of "Count Buffon's Problem." During one of his investigations, visitors to Buffon's estate would find him blindfolded, throwing wooden knitting needles over his shoulder onto the square-tiled floor of his conservatory and then, with sight restored, recording where they fell. Leclerc used the data to work out the probability that any needle would land in such a way that it intersected one of the lines between the tiles. Then he showed that you could use the results to determine the elusive value of the mathematical constant Pi, which, as every high school geometry student knows, has a still-unresolved value that begins 3.1415926. … and can be used to calculate the circumference and area of a circle. Strangely, an anagram of the name Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, is: So get bogus clue of circle from needle.

A straightforward career was not for the likes of this well-heeled country aristocrat. All the world of learning was open to him, and perhaps having grown tired of his math homework, he began to dabble in cosmology and the origins of the solar system.

It's hard nowadays to fully comprehend that 200 years ago the consensus was that the world was 6,000 years old, give or take the odd bank holiday. The source of this information was the Bible.

Georges Louis Leclerc speculated that our planetary system was created out of the collision of a comet and the sun, and, on the basis of backyard experiments with the cooling rates of chunks of hot iron, he concluded the world was vastly older than had previously been thought. The figure he arrived at was 75,000 years. Of course, by today's cosmological yardstick that number would be laughed out of court. But in eighteenth-century France it was no laughing matter. The Catholic cardinals and bishops were not going to stand for anybody questioning their biblically inspired judgment with what amounted to an open and shut case of good old-fashioned heresy.

In keeping with the church's ancient cure-all that applied equally to witches, rabbler-ousers, and other anticlerical mountebanks, Leclerc's books were burned in public. Now he could understand how Galileo felt centuries before.

Leclerc, however, was undaunted. Discretely supported by France's intelligentsia, he was appointed keeper of the Royal Gardens, now known as Le Jardin des Plantes, in Paris's bohemian quarter. Initially Leclerc's role was to catalog the royal collections, but with his ambition and dedication the task became an enormous, comprehensive plan to catalog all existing knowledge of natural history, geology, and anthropology in one book. The book, titled Histoire Naturelle, Generale et Particuliere, in time would amount to forty-four volumes, the last eight being published after Leclerc's death by his associates. It was one of the masterpieces of the day, and made him Europe's leading natural historian. He became the eighteenth-century equivalent of David Attenborough, a trusted commentator on virtually anything and everything to do with the natural world.

In those pre-National Geographic times the public's appetite for natural history was insatiable. Count Buffon's Histoire Naturelle was among the first publications to address that curiosity. Hardly anybody had ever traveled or had even the foggiest notion of exotic foreign wildlife. Even in the early 1800s, years after the publication of Leclerc's masterpiece, the biggest crowds ever witnessed in France came to see not the king but a hapless young giraffe that had been captured in the Sudan and shipped as a present from the king of Egypt to Marseilles en route to Paris. The animal was forced to walk from the Mediterranean coast all the way to the Royal Gardens in Paris — Count Buffon's old stomping grounds. Such was the excitement that in Lyon alone, 30,000 gawking sightseers converged on the route in the hope of getting a glimpse of the gangling young animal loping northward.

But Leclerc's volumes were not confined to mere description of rare furry animals. He wrestled with a host of tough topics, particularly in view of the era. His observations on evolution and the similarities between man and the great apes involved a quantum leap in thinking. Almost a century later, Charles Darwin would take up his suggestion that species are not created individually but evolve from common ancestors.

Some of Leclerc's interpretations, however, were wildly speculative. In the broad sweep of his pen, Leclerc made astonishing claims, and it would be one of these claims that got him into hot water with the New World's brightest star, Thomas Jefferson.

The suspect hypothesis centered on something called "degeneracy." In a nutshell, Leclerc said , that the New World was a thoroughly horrid place, and suffered from a terrible climate — particularly humidity. The result was that the vegetation and the animals it supported were quite inferior in size and numbers to European species. Moreover, Count Buffon said, New World humans were degenerate, and that anyone or anything stepping off the boat from Europe would soon experience the onset of degeneracy in body and mind-such as "dogs who cease to bark after awhile in the New World's infernal atmosphere." Of course the French naturalist had never ventured across the Atlantic briny to see this hellhole for himself But he had heard about it. And people believed him.

This French faux pas may have been the result not just of bad research. The problem possibly was that Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, was a product of the Old World, and in any discussion of the New World he found it rather hard not to turn up his nose.

At that time, between 1785 and 1789, just before the French Revolution, Jefferson was the United States emissary to the court of Louis XVI in Paris. But accomplished politician that he was, Jefferson's heart lay elsewhere. "Nature" he said, "intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived have forced me to … commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions."

Anyway, when Jefferson read Buffon's work, he was outraged. Such arrogant, pseudoscientific gobbledygook could not be left unchallenged. It wasn't just a matter of Yankee pride. America's image would suffer, and as a young country intent on attracting immigrants, Buffon's demeaning ramblings could do damage. It was time to strike back … with the truth.

If anyone could pop Buffon's bubble it was Jefferson. He was an accomplished scientist in his own right, though he never claimed to be more than an amateur. In his book Notes on the State of Virginia, which went through nineteen editions in five countries, Jefferson pours cold water on Buffon's assertion "that nature is less active, less energetic on one side of the globe than on the other … as if both sides were not warmed by the same genial sun."

Jefferson compared European and American species. First he showed that of the twenty-six four-legged animals common, to both continents, seven are larger in America, seven are the same size, and, for lack of evidence, twelve were "don't knows."

He compared eighteen animals peculiar to Europe with seventy-four exclusively American species. And he pointed out that just one of the American species — the tapir — weighed more than the eighteen European species put together.

Round one to Mr. Jefferson. Buffon was talking through his hat. But the wily Jefferson wasn't finished. In what was to be his coup de grace, Jefferson devised a great piece of political showmanship to prove his point.

It was January 1786. Jefferson, still in Paris, wrote to an old friend, General John Sullivan of New Hampshire, asking him to try to get hold of the skin, skeleton, and horns of a moose, and send them posthaste to his lodgings. Sullivan was given instructions on how to prepare the animal for its transatlantic adventure, the idea being that it should be stuffed and appear large. Very large. It's not hard to picture Jefferson rubbing his hands gleefully, smiling to himself, anticipating the five-foot-nothing Monsieur Buffon coming face to face with a seven-foot moose in the lobby of Jefferson's Paris hostelry.

As events transpired, however, by the time the request was filled, and a rather mangy, partly preserved, and probably slightly smelly dead moose, minus its rack of horns, arrived from New Hampshire, a year had passed. Count Buffon had taken ill, left the Jardin des Plantes, and retired to his country estate. So Jefferson's hope of inviting Buffon to his lodgings to ogle the quadruped went ungratified. Perhaps that was just as well, because by the time Jefferson had assembled the skeleton and fixed a substitute set of antlers at a particularly jaunty angle, a good deal of the animal's hair had fallen out, giving the impression of a distinctly moth-eaten — and dare we say it? — degenerate example of the species. Whether Buffon would have been impressed is anybody's guess. The specimen, however, was duly delivered to the Jardin des Plantes on Rue Geoffroy St Hilaire, and Buffon, through his associate, thanked the Virginian for his "contribution to natural science."

The upshot of Jefferson's mangy moose escapade is somewhat doubtful. Buffon died in 1788, the year after the stuffed moose arrived. Buffon's last months were spent at home on his estate, so whether he ever set eyes on the thing is open to question. It is reported that the count did finally acknowledge the error that had ruffled so many American feathers, and he admitted that he should have consulted Jefferson before publishing his Histoire Naturelle: "Then I could have been. sure of my facts."

In later life, Thomas Jefferson confided to a friend that Buffon had indeed promised to set the record straight in his next book. But the count died before he could put pen to paper.

Andrew Gardner, who writes on Canada's Salt Spring Island, contributed to the winter 2005 journal "Revolutionary America's Allies and the Invasions of Great Britain."

To learn more of Count Buffon's Problem, go to www.geocities.com/thesciencefiles/buffon/buffon.html

[El Gato]

If Buffon had showed up in Jefferson's digs, would the moose have bit his sister?