36. Going to War to Defend the Honor of American Megafauna
Thomas Jefferson was extremely upset by Count Buffon’s Theory of New World Degeneration. Instead of dismissing it as silly gibberish, Jefferson saw Buffon’s take as an insult to America and its potential greatness. So he set out to challenge the Frenchman with evidence of American bigness. He wrote friends back home, asking them to measure the size of American animals.
Among the responses was one from James Madison, who sent precise measurements of a Virginian weasel, including the “distance between the anus and vulva“. Like an eighteenth-century version of George Costanza from Seinfeld, Jefferson grew increasingly obsessed with proving Buffon wrong, and painstakingly compiled the measurements in a table. It included comparisons such as those between 12-pound American otters vs 8.9 European counterparts, and 410-pound American bears vs 153.7 pound European ones. Itching to confront the Frenchman, Jefferson accepted a dinner invitation at Buffon’s home, and headed there armed with his data for a showdown.