Under a Wild Sky (8 page)

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.

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 maintained that an “error corrected” equals a truth told. But he died almost immediately after viewing Jefferson's “moose.”

Jefferson had been less good-humored in responding to Buffon's claims that American Indians were impotent and cowardly.
He denounced Buffon's characterization of the Indians as an “afflicting picture indeed which, for the honor of human nature, I am glad to believe has no original.” Unlike Buffon, Jefferson had firsthand knowledge of Indians, whom he described at length as being brave and intelligent and passionate—and quite obviously members of the same species as Europeans.
This argument, especially when coupled with Jefferson's racist discussion of American slaves—in which he weakly endorsed limited emancipation but described blacks as being in most respects inferior to whites—muddled the meaning of
Notes on the State of Virginia
for many American readers. But for the generation of naturalists who arrived in its wake, Jefferson's little book was a revelation. Jefferson had identified the limits of European understanding of New World natural history. In doing so, he had established two fundamental principles that would guide the future study of native fauna.

First, Jefferson proved the importance of direct observation. Buffon,
relying on secondhand information and poorly preserved specimens collected on the opposite side of the world, had got many things wrong. North American fauna were not the shrimpy, defective creatures Buffon had pronounced them to be. Animals could not be correctly identified and described from afar, but only through actual contact with them in the field. Logically, only Americans could accurately classify American fauna. Second, Jefferson showed that America was a robust environment, home to many species not found elsewhere in the world—including some that were perhaps no longer walking around. The Linnaean system was woefully short of genera and severely underestimated species diversity. American naturalists had already discovered and described species previously unknown to science that demanded new nomenclature. And Jefferson had left open the door for the discovery of many more.
Listing more than 120 species of North American birds, Jefferson anticipated this was only a beginning, as there were “doubtless many others which have not yet been described and classed.” Within a few decades, naturalists who were curious about fauna that Jefferson scarcely considered—mollusks, insects, fishes—would fan out across the country and find new species at an astonishing pace.

Twenty years after
Notes on the State of Virginia
was published, Jefferson, recently reelected to the presidency, received a fan letter from a citizen just back from a visit to Niagara Falls. The letter was brief, consisting mostly of praise for the president, a man “so honourable to Science and so invaluable to the republican institutions of a great and rapidly increasing Empire.” Somewhat apologetically, the writer also mentioned two birds he had shot on his trip, one of which seemed to be an unknown species of jay. Based on his observation of this and several more exotic species in the region, the writer wished to alert the president that “many subjects still remain to be added to our Nomenclature in the Ornithology.” If it was not too much of an impertinence, the writer wished the President to accept a drawing, which accompanied the letter, of the two birds.

The letter was signed “Alexander Wilson.”

4

LESSONS

Falco plumbeus
: The Mississippi Kite

He glances toward the earth with his fiery eye; sweeps along, now with the gentle breeze, now against it.

—Ornithological Biography

W
ilson's letter to Thomas Jefferson was less about his respect for the president—though that was real enough—than it was about his recently formed determination to produce an ornithology of American birds.
Only months before, he had begun practicing his drawing by making repeated likenesses of a stuffed owl. Untrained as an artist, Wilson knew his initial efforts looked comical—a crude owlish head sitting atop a body that more closely resembled a lark's. But his technique improved rapidly, and the drawing he sent to Jefferson was a competent rendering of a handsome gray bird perched on a branch, its tail angled sharply downward and its head cocked forward as if it were studying something on the ground below.
Wilson acknowledged that this unknown species of jay was similar to the Canadian jay, which had already been described and classed by Linnaeus. But he thought the plumage and shape of the bird's crest sufficiently different that it must be considered a separate species. Wilson's claim of having seen many other birds not yet formally described echoed Jefferson's prediction two decades earlier in
Notes on the State of Virginia
.

The president was impressed, and wrote back to say he admired the “elegant” drawing he'd received. He also asked Wilson for assistance in identifying a bird he had spent twenty years wondering about. This bird, Jefferson wrote, was found everywhere in America but was difficult to
observe. It was almost always perched on the highest branches of the tallest trees in the forest. Despite having chased them—on occasion through “miles” of woods—Jefferson had never gotten a good look at one. He'd also offered to reward anyone who could shoot him a specimen, but none of the young woodsmen he knew had managed it. The elusive bird appeared to be about the same size as a mockingbird and was generally brownish, with a lighter coloring on its breast. What was most notable, however, was its song, which Jefferson described as a glorious serenade, not unlike the nightingale's.

In retrospect, this exchange is an amusing demonstration of the primitive state of American natural science at the time. The jay Wilson “discovered” was in fact a Canadian jay and not a new species at all—as he was later pained to learn.
As for the bird that so beguiled Jefferson, Wilson could only conclude that it was the ordinary wood thrush, a common bird also known as a “wood robin” that was not mysterious to anyone who spent time in the forest. Jefferson was, however, rightly smitten with the song of the wood thrush, which was so lovely that it taxed Wilson's descriptive powers a couple of years later when he completed an essay on the bird and its habits for
American Ornithology
: