Free Under a Wild Sky by William Souder

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 wouldhave 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.
    Jefferson thought there was only one reasonable explanation. Nature, he said, had drawn a “belt of separation between these two tremendous animals,” and in so doing, “assigned to the elephant the regions South of these confines, and those North to the mammoth, founding the constitution of the one in her extreme of heat, and that of the other in the extreme of cold.” Given the efforts of the Creator to thus distinguish these two animals by disposition and by geography, was it not then “perverse” of man to believe they were the same beast?
    But Jefferson was less interested in the precise identity of the mammoth than he was in what the beast suggested about the faunal environment of the New World.Jefferson was well versed in Indian legends concerning the mammoth, which the Indians sometimes called the “big buffalo,” and had heard reports that Indian tribes in the north and west of the continent claimed the animal still existed in remote areas. Jefferson’s presumption was that remnant populations of the mammoth represented greatly reduced numbers as the animals retreated ahead of the settlers advancing into North America. It was much the same thing as was happening to the Indians.Some years later, when Jefferson dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the American West, he would instruct the party to be on the lookout for mammoths. But even without a live mammoth to point to, or certainty of what the animal was, its existence refuted the concept of degeneration.
    But to whatever animal we ascribe these remains, it is certain such a one has existed in America, and that it has been the largest of all terrestrial beings. It should have sufficed to have rescued the earth it inhabited, and the atmosphere it breathed, from the imputation of impotence in the conception and nourishment of animal life on a large scale: to have stifled in its birth the opinion of a writer, the most learned too of all others in the science of animal history, that in the new world . . . nature is less active, less energetic on one side of the globe than she is on the other. As if both sides were not warmed by the same genial sun . . .
    Jefferson backed up his velvety demolition of Buffon’s theory with hard numbers. In table after table, Jefferson showed that animals common to both North America and Europe—from elk to flying squirrels—were in many cases bigger in the New World, and that there were so many species unique to America that no one could doubt the natural vitality of the continent.
    During his time in Paris, Jefferson met with Buffon on several occasions and tried to talk him out of his ideas about degeneration. He found Buffon polite but indifferent until Buffon was presented with an ambitious argument.Jefferson prevailed on the governor of New Hampshire to send a moose to him in France. The governor dispatched a troop of soldiers who shot a sizable bull. The animal was dressed and skinned, and after the skeleton had been cleaned and dried, its hide was stitched together such that it could be draped over the bones in a semblance of its original shape. After some delay, the “moose” arrived in Paris and Jefferson showed it off to Buffon. Amazed at the animal’s size—it was as big as a large draft horse—the aged naturalist agreed that he would have to amend his theory. Buffon had always