Reviews of Books

In Notes on the State of Virginia (1784) Thomas Jefferson famously defended the flora, fauna, and native inhabitants of North America almost as fervently as he had championed American rights in the Declaration of Independence. What stirred his outrage was the disdain for the New World fostered by the influential French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc De Buffon, whose Histoire Naturelle (1749–1804) maintained that America was inferior to Europe in its very nature. According to Buffon, the New World was too moist, too cold, and too immature to sustain life on a grand, advanced scale. Witness its animal species, invariably smaller and less vigorous than their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic. Not so, replied Jefferson, who devoted pages of his Notes on Virginia to a scientific refutation of Buffon. A key piece of evidence in his brief was a legendary creature known as the mammoth, an animal five or six times larger than an elephant, the bones and teeth of which had been brought to the Virginia governor from the Big Bone Lick on the banks of the Ohio River. Though nobody had ever seen the beast in the flesh, Jefferson was sure it existed somewhere in the vast interior of America; and he offered it up as proof that America was home to the earth's largest animal.	1
Jefferson was one of many eighteenth-century figures on both sides of the Atlantic for whom natural history constituted a subject on the cutting edge of learning, with immense philosophical and political import. For historians today, this realm of thought also holds great potential; it promises to enrich our understanding of the intellectual world inhabited by the founders of the republic. Paul Semonin's American Monster is a major contribution to this developing area of intellectual history. It builds on the encyclopedic scholarship of Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World (Milan, 1955; trans. Jeremy Moyle, Pittsburgh, 1973), who traced the influence of Buffon's and other proto-scientific theories of American inferiority. More recently, studies of the Bartrams (Thomas Slaughter, The Natures of John and William Bartram [New York, 1996]) and of Mark Catesby (Amy R. W. Meyers and Margaret Beck Pritchard, eds., Empire's Nature: Mark Catesby's New World Vision [Chapel Hill, 1998]) analyze the careers of prominent naturalists in eighteenth-century North America. Semonin takes a different approach. Instead of writing about natural historians, he concentrates on the mysterious phenomenon that captivated their attention: the mastodon or mammoth, which was the most important object of American natural history of the era. Along the way, he surveys the work of Buffon, Thomas Burnet, Charles Willson Peale, and others and explains paradigm shifts that have shaped the modern understanding of geology, paleontology, and evolution.	2
The story begins in 1705, when a Dutch farmer at Claverack, near Albany, found teeth and bones of a giant creature. The Puritan poet Edward Taylor saw some of these remains when Dutch colonists visited him on the way to Boston, and he wrote an unfinished verse about "the Monster buried at Claverack" that credited Indian legends of ancient giants. The ubiquitous Cotton Mather inspected the bones when they arrived in Boston, and though he scoffed at the Native Americans' explanation, he took theological satisfaction from their existence: "The Giants that once groaned under the waters, are now found under the Earth, and their Dead Bones are Lively Proofs of the Mosaic history" (p. 30). Mather hoped that his report on the bones might earn him membership in the Royal Society in London, but in vain; the editors of its Transactions rejected his submission. (The prolific clergyman succeeded with another subject nine years later.) As it happened, the American bones were not the only such remains stirring interest in European learned circles; as Semonin explains, contemporary discoveries of similar fossils in Ireland and Siberia were launching the study of comparative anatomy and prompting the realization that elephantine creatures had once inhabited all these regions. Semonin calls the beast "the incognitum," preferring that term over "mammoth," a vernacular word adopted from the Russian settlers in Siberia who had found such bones; the formal taxonomic description of the mastodon was not advanced until Georges Cuvier in 1806.	. . .