Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

Again, Jefferson could have answered these questions very, very directly with a couple of sentences, but that's not how that's going to go.

And one of the things that's sort of making it around enlightenment circles is this idea put out by a French naturalist named the Comte de Buffon, who says that everything in America is degenerate.

All the plants, all the animals, all the people are lesser than Europe.

And there are climate reasons for this, mostly.

This certainly became a way to spread ideas about nationalism, to feed a new nation, and also start promoting ideas about abundance.

And o- one of the theories that comes out of the 18th into the 19th century is French philosopher the Comte de Buffon, who has this theory of degeneracy and says, "The New World is puny.

Nothing will survive, and nothing can thrive in this landscape." And Thomas Jefferson took great issue with this.

And so not only did he want to prove Buffon wrong, but he created a competition for the largest moose that could be found, that would be stuffed and sent to Buffon to say, "Hardly do we have issues of a, a puny landscape.

Back at the country's founding, Ben Franklin had gone out of his way to establish it as a scientific center and this was at a time when the European scientists thought the American scientists were really beneath their notice.

The premier European scientist at this time is the Comte de Buffon.

And in some of his writing, he says that America is a degraded continent.

All living things are smaller and weaker, including its people, including its animals.

One of his things that he says is, if you send dogs to America, they'll lose the ability to bark.

The Americans do not like this.

Thomas Jefferson actually sends this comte de Buffon a moose skull to show just how big and impressive American wildlife can be.

By the 1820s, there is a long tradition of American naturalists in Philadelphia.

But I wanted to give you this brief moment from one of the other queries in Jefferson's notes on the state of Virginia, which is a text that he is using to respond to European... interlocutors to people he's in correspondence with who have asked him, can you describe the nature of the land of Virginia? Can you describe the new world to us? Can you describe what you see here? And so notes on the state of Virginia is Jefferson's attempt to document this through the Rhetorical, it's not really a fiction, because he is in correspondence with people, but it's an opportunity to say, I'm gonna tell you all these things about Virginia, because my friends in Europe really wanna know about it.

And he's, in the sections that you did read for today, especially responding to a European scientist named the Comte Buffon, whose thesis, and we'll get into this in a minute, is that everything in America is degenerating, and Jefferson does not like the sound of that.

But in this particular moment, he's describing coming through the Blue Ridge Mountains and standing at the top of a prospect.

And it's a weird moment because he changes his mode of address.