Under a Wild Sky, page 5
The subject of Buffon’s Natural History was everything. Buffon endeavored to explain all that was known about the physical world, including its origins. He covered geology and anthropology, the formation of the planets, reproduction, astronomy, meteorology, mineralogy. He wrote about the oceans and air and continents. He covered physics and botany and zoology and, of course, taxonomy. Buffon liked naming things every bit as much as Linnaeus did, though the two profoundly disagreed on how to catalogue the taxa. Buffon thought the Linnaean system was flawed and far too generous in the way it defined species. Buffon, for example, thought all quadrupeds were variants on just thirty-eight mammalian species. Buffon didn’t care for purely morphological analyses, and he poked fun at the way shared characteristics sometimes led Linnaeus into highly improbable groupings of animals that were obviously distant from one another. Buffon saw nature as more varied and more of a continuum. Nature, Buffon insisted, “works by insensible degrees.” Taxonomic associations based on one or a few physical traits inevitably produced arbitrary divisions.
Buffon based his definition of a species on reproductive compatibility instead. A species, Buffon decided, comprises those closely related organisms that can interbreed and produce fertile offspring—a definition still widely accepted. Buffon offered a classic example: “The ass resembles the horse more than the water spaniel the hound, but nonetheless the water spaniel and the hound are only one species, since they together produce individuals that can themselves produce others, whereas the horse and the ass are certainly from different species, since they together produce only defective and barren individuals.” In other words, the sterility of a mule, the hybrid that results from breeding an ass and a horse, is a dead end in nature. A species, Buffon said, was marked by the persistence of its generations through time—a “chain of successive existence.”
Buffon’s Natural History was massive, expensive, and despite Buffon’s nebulous background in many areas of natural history, widely read. Prior to writing the Natural History, Buffon’s interests had centered on physics and celestial mechanics. He worked on the “problem” of infinity, a troublesome concept useful in mathematics but perplexing as an aspect of reality. He also conducted experiments in optics and rocketry, including attempts to calculate the size and configuration of the propellant required to send a rocket into space. Intrigued by the story of Archimedes setting the Roman fleet ablaze at Syracuse by means of reflected sunlight, Buffon had invented a “burning mirror” that could melt iron at close range or set fire to buildings two hundred feet away.
Buffon understood nature as a process—one involving a multitude of fluid interactions and changes taking place over time. He believed the earth was much older than the biblical claim of a few thousand years, and also that conditions on the planet had varied throughout its history. Life, he proposed, was a cosmic accident made possible by affinities between organic molecules that cohered into organisms. Anticipating Darwinian evolution, Buffon stated that all life forms were influenced by environmental conditions and were subject to incremental variations that ultimately gave rise to the plants and animals as they appeared in the present.
These brilliant (and probably heretical) insights led Buffon to speculate a little too freely on some of the taxa that were distributed around the world and now had come to the attention of naturalists in Europe.
Buffon never went to America. He studied accounts of North American wildlife and examined specimens submitted to the king’s collection, measuring and comparing them closely with European species. Many of the ideas he formed about the New World were based on reports that were inaccurate, mean-spirited, or poorly translated. Buffon’s focus on North American fauna was also a notable departure from the existing interest in the natural history of the New World, which had focused on plants. European horticulturists saw the botanical wealth of America as a potentially important resource given the depleted plant stocks in Europe.
Buffon detected several things about American animals. For one, it was clear that some species in the New World were unique. There were no turkeys or rattlesnakes or bald eagles in Europe. These belonged to the exotica of America. But it was equally apparent that America was home to many animals—deer, bears, beavers, porcupines, foxes, wolves—that also lived in Europe or Asia. Buffon supposed that America must have been colonized by animals that long ago proceeded across a former land bridge to North America, presumably to escape hunting and crowding in the Old World. Once there, some maintained their original forms, while others diverged and gave rise to novel species. What was most remarkable to Buffon concerned the animals common to both the Old and New Worlds: Animals from America were smaller than their counterparts in Europe.
Buffon proposed an unorthodox explanation for this discrepancy. The differences between Old World and New World animals belonging to the same species, Buffon determined, must be the result of environmental differences between Europe and America—most important, the harshness of the North American climate. In the New World, wrote Buffon, “nature is always rude and sometimes deformed.” America, he said, was well suited to lower life forms like reptiles and bugs, but was otherwise a gloomy and disadvantaged environment for living things. “The air and the earth overloaded with humid and noxious vapors are unable either to purify themselves or to profit by the influence of the sun, who darts in vain his most enlivening rays upon this frigid mass.”
Buffon described a kind of ecological withering that was the reverse of evolution, in which animals responded over time to an oppressive climate by becoming less fit. America was a land of stunted, less vigorous survivors. Buffon called this process “degeneration,” and he claimed it as an example of the kind of morphological changes wrought by nature over long periods. “These changes are made only slowly, imperceptibly,” Buffon wrote. “The great worker of Nature is Time; as it always moves with an equal, uniform, and regulated pace, it does everything; and these changes, at first imperceptible, become noticeable little by little, and finally leave results about which one cannot be mistaken.”
The idea caught on. Europeans were already convinced of the inhospitable environment in America. From the time they first set foot in the New World, European explorers had reported its many unpleasantries. There were frightening snakes, tormenting insects, sour fens, and forbidding forests shrouded in fogs and poisonous airs. The land, unlike Europe, had not been improved through the industry of its native people. Although much of the continent was near the same latitudes as Europe, North America was much colder in the winter and endured awful heat and humidity in the summer.
Buffon argued that the degenerative effects of the North American climate could be seen even in livestock brought over from Europe—which he insisted also grew smaller than their ancestors. He stopped short of claiming that the same thing happened to the human colonists, though some of Buffon’s adherents said as much. What finally brought a response to Buffon from America was what he said about the New World’s aboriginal people—judgments again made without any direct observation to back them up. Indians, he said, were no different from the animals of America. They were a degenerate species. Because Indians were about the same size as Europeans, Buffon defended his theory with a wildly racist assessment of their many other deficiencies:
Although the savage of the new world is about the same height as man in our world, this does not suffice for him to constitute an exception to the general fact that all living nature has become smaller on that continent. The savage is feeble, and has small organs of generation; he has neither hair nor beard, and no ardor whatever for his female; although swifter than the European because he is better accustomed to running, he is, on the other hand, less strong in body; he is also less sensitive, and yet more timid and cowardly; he has no vivacity, no activity of mind; the activity of his body is less an exercise, a voluntary motion, than a necessary action caused by want; relieve him of hunger and thirst, and you deprive him of the active principle of all his movements; he will rest stupidly upon his legs or lying down entire days.
An answer to these brutal words—and to the whole theory of degeneration—would be offered, and when it came it would mark the beginning of American science.
In 1705, a farmer mucking about on the banks of the Hudson River near Albany, New York, found something odd. Spring floods had eroded the riverbank, exposing a foreign object. It was a gigantic tooth, about the size of a fist and weighing almost five pounds. Further excavation at the site unearthed the remains of a large animal that had presumably owned the tooth, including what appeared to be a thighbone approximately seventeen feet long. These additional parts were so badly decomposed that they crumbled instantly upon being dug up and could not be identified. The tooth, meanwhile, went on a journey.
It was sent to the Royal Society in London, in a box labeled “tooth of a Giant.” The society was arguably the most respected scientific institution in the world. Its president at the time was Sir Isaac Newton. Everyone there agreed that it was a very big tooth indeed. Beyond that, things got hazy. For a while the prevailing feeling in both London and America was that the tooth might have belonged to a giant of the sort mentioned in the Book of Genesis. As more teeth and bones were discovered in America, this theory gained momentum. Cotton Mather, the influential Boston cleric, examined some of the relics and wrote a series of letters to the Royal Society affirming that they were indeed the remains of biblical giants drowned in Noah’s flood. It was all perfectly obvious to Mather. God, disgusted with the wickedness of the world, had caused the children of normal-sized parents to become giants by putting something in their food. Although the giants proved highly troublesome, they were in the end insufficient punishment, so God drowned the earth, the giants included. Mather was an avid collector of sensational natural anomalies, and kept track of weird birth defects in animals and humans. He seemed to take a special pride in the apparent size of his supposed giants—who he calculated must have been about seventy feet tall. This, Mather noted, was bigger than other giants, mythical or biblical. It was also significant, he said, that they had been found in America, making them even more “curious and marvelous.”
There were, of course, alternative theories about the tooth, which happened to look a lot like some other big teeth the Royal Society already had in its collection. Debate as to what they belonged to was lively. Perhaps they came from large sea creatures, maybe whales. Elephants, believed to have been brought to England by the Romans, were also considered. No one suggested they were from animals no longer living on the planet, as that would have been inconsistent with the biblical history of the world. Even Isaac Newton still believed the earth was no more than six thousand years old.
But things were changing. There was growing interest in comparative anatomy, and a number of English naturalists argued that the large teeth and oversized bones that suddenly seemed to be turning up everywhere were not, in fact, human. The discussion shifted to a mystery animal, one presumably still out in the world somewhere. In America it was dubbed the incognitum—the unknown. Then, in the early 1720s, reports began to circulate that Mongol tribesmen in Siberia sometimes scavenged ivory from enormous tusks found attached to the frozen carcasses of huge, elephantlike creatures that occasionally emerged when the tundra thawed in spring. It was frankly difficult to understand how elephants—tropical animals—had ended up on the icy steppe. The same difficulty existed in North America, which was decidedly not elephant country. One possible explanation was that the earth’s orientation to the sun was different long ago, and that temperate regions had once been warmer. Meanwhile, a new term entered the discussion, thanks to the Mongols who called their mystery animal mammuts. The mammuts had teeth similar to the ones being found in the West.
In 1739, a French military expedition traveled down the Ohio River by canoe, floating into a region of the country as yet unmapped by Europeans. They found the river broad and clear and more beautiful than any they had ever seen. Flanked by forests extending to the horizons, the river carried them deep into a shadowland of towering trees and thundering game. Great herds of bison and deer and elk rumbled through the woods, following thoroughfares created by their regular tramplings. These lanes, in places wider than two wagonways, formed a network connecting surface mineral deposits and marshes that were rich with salt. Animals gathered at these “salt licks” in large numbers, making them favored hunting spots among the Indians. About six hundred miles west of Fort Pitt, on the eastern bank of the river in what would one day become Kentucky, the party made camp not far from a large marsh that stank of sulfur. Scouts were dispatched to explore the swamp, which was at the juncture of several major game trails. They soon returned laden with an assortment of astonishingly large bones and tusks. When the main party hurried down the trail to investigate, they discovered a natural graveyard—a fetid, muddy wetland piled with enormous skeletons.
For the next several decades, the bones and teeth retrieved from “Big Bone Lick,” as it came to be called, fueled the controversy over the incognitum. Benjamin Franklin, serving as a colonial emissary in London in the 1750s and 1760s, joined in the debate as to whether these remains were from some species of carnivore. Dissimilarities between the grinding teeth of the incognitum and the molars of elephants convinced some naturalists that the animal was indeed a meat-eater. Franklin thought so too at first, but in the end sided with those who argued it must have been an herbivore because its tremendous size would have made the incognitum too slow and awkward to pursue prey. Interest in the fossils remained so high that during the Revolutionary War George Washington took time to dig up ancient bones at several battlefield sites.
It was just before the end of the war that the governor of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, along with the other governors of the new states, received a questionnaire from the French ambassador asking for a summary of natural resources and political institutions in America. Only Jefferson found time to respond, although it took him five years to do so. His response came in the form of a slim book, Notes on the State of Virginia, which had developed into a more elaborate reply than the ambassador probably expected. The book marked a transition in the approach to natural science in the New World and would eventually precipitate a revolution in American thought about the land it was overspreading.
In his book—it was the only one he wrote—Jefferson provided a detailed guide to Virginia’s flora and fauna, including tables giving the sizes and weights of animals; to its geographical boundaries and internal topography; to its rivers, including their length, breadth, and navigability; to its mineral deposits, including discussions of mining operations and valuable ores and gemstones; to its population, military capabilities, laws, cities and towns, forms of government, and religion; to its agriculture and manufacturing; to its currency; to its buildings and roads. In his discussion of the people of Virginia—whites, slaves, and aboriginals—Jefferson vigorously defended American Indians against Buffon’s scathing assessment. But in the same breath, he advanced a contradictory and confusing racial theory that seemed to argue for and against slavery all at once. Jefferson, who was serving as ambassador to France when the book first appeared in Paris in 1785, held off publication in the United States for two more years, anticipating that it would outrage people on both sides of the slavery issue.
Jefferson had reasons to make such a thorough inventory of Virginia. Emerging from revolution, America found itself mired in debt and an object of skepticism in Europe. The new republic appeared to be not only impoverished and materially pathetic, but also politically unstable. Europeans continued to wonder if there was anything of value in the wilderness of the New World beyond the narrow beachhead claimed by the former colonies. Jefferson saw it in reverse. America, he believed, was a land of unimagined natural wealth and diversity—a country that would someday exert itself as an economic force. As one of the architects of American independence, Jefferson felt obliged to correct the American image abroad—and to provide assurance to allies and creditors that the young nation’s current straits were only temporary. The French, who sided with the Americans in the Revolution and whose trade policies were seen as more friendly than England’s, were exactly the people Jefferson wanted to impress.
Jefferson was also instinctively drawn to the challenge of merging science and statesmanship—disciplines he did not regard as so separate and distinct as we do now. Like other adherents to the principles of the Enlightenment, Jefferson believed that all knowledge and all forms of social organization could be derived from the study of natural history. Jefferson saw a chance to show the rest of the world what America was made of, and, by extension, what America stood for. Here, too, was an opportunity to answer Buffon. When Jefferson turned his attention to the size and vigor of American animals in his Notes, he began with the big quadruped that was by then being called the mammoth.
Jefferson did not think the large skeletons found in America were the remains of elephants. Nor would he entertain any thought that they belonged to an animal that no longer existed. Jefferson did not believe in extinction. “Such is the economy of nature,” he wrote, “that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.” Instead, he declared that mammoths were one of God’s proofs against Buffon’s theory of degeneration in the New World. Mammoth remains hinted at an animal with “six times the cubic volume of the elephant,” Jefferson wrote. The teeth of the mammoth and the elephant were different, and Jefferson noted that elephant remains had never been discovered in North America. Jefferson considered—and rejected—alternative theories in which elephants and mammoths could be one and the same. Could elephants be more adaptable to cold climates than was believed? No. Could an “internal fire” deep in the earth once have warmed the higher latitudes to a range comfortable for elephants? There was no evidence of such. Was it possible that the angle of the earth’s axis relative to the sun had changed, and that northern regions were formerly warmer for that reason? Maybe. But Jefferson concluded that, given the maximum shift anyone could conceive, these northern elephants would have had to have lived some 250,000 years ago! Here Jefferson declined to invoke biblical time lines, noting instead that many mammoth bones had been discovered lying in the open air and could not possibly have remained intact for so long given such exposure.
