to a giant of the sort mentioned in the Book of Genesis. As more teeth and bones were discovered in America, this theory gained momentum. Cotton Mather, the influential Boston cleric, examined some of the relics and wrote a series of letters to the Royal Society affirming that they were indeed the remains of biblical giants drowned in Noah’s flood. It was all perfectly obvious to Mather. God, disgusted with the wickedness of the world, had caused the children of normal-sized parents to become giants by putting something in their food. Although the giants proved highly troublesome, they were in the end insufficient punishment, so God drowned the earth, the giants included. Mather was an avid collector of sensational natural anomalies, and kept track of weird birth defects in animals and humans. He seemed to take a special pride in the apparent size of his supposed giants—who he calculated must have been about seventy feet tall. This, Mather noted, was bigger than other giants, mythical or biblical. It was also significant, he said, that they had been found in America, making them even more “curious and marvelous.”
There were, of course, alternative theories about the tooth, which happened to look a lot like some other big teeth the Royal Society already had in its collection. Debate as to what they belonged to was lively. Perhaps they came from large sea creatures, maybe whales. Elephants, believed to have been brought to England by the Romans, were also considered. No one suggested they were from animals no longer living on the planet, as that would have been inconsistent with the biblical history of the world. Even Isaac Newton still believed the earth was no more than six thousand years old.
But things were changing. There was growing interest in comparative anatomy, and a number of English naturalists argued that the large teeth and oversized bones that suddenly seemed to be turning up everywhere were not, in fact, human. The discussion shifted to a mystery animal, one presumably still out in the world somewhere. In America it was dubbed the incognitum—the unknown. Then, in the early 1720s, reports began to circulate that Mongol tribesmen in Siberia sometimes scavenged ivory from enormous tusks found attached to the frozen carcasses of huge, elephantlike creatures that occasionally emerged when the tundra thawed in spring. It was frankly difficult to understand how elephants—tropical animals—had ended up on the icy steppe. The same difficulty existed in North America, which was decidedly not elephant country. One possible explanation was that the earth’s orientation to the sun was different long ago, and that temperate regions had once been warmer. Meanwhile, a new term entered the discussion, thanks to the Mongols who called their mystery animal mammuts. The mammuts had teeth similar to the ones being found in the West.
In 1739, a French military expedition traveled down the Ohio River by canoe, floating into a region of the country as yet unmapped by Europeans. They found the river broad and clear and more beautiful than any they had ever seen. Flanked by forests extending to the horizons, the river carried them deep into a shadowland of towering trees and thundering game. Great herds of bison and deer and elk rumbled through the woods, following thoroughfares created by their regular tramplings. These lanes, in places wider than two wagonways, formed a network connecting surface mineral deposits and marshes that were rich with salt. Animals gathered at these “salt licks” in large numbers, making them favored hunting spots among the Indians. About six hundred miles west of Fort Pitt, on the eastern bank of the river in what would one day become Kentucky, the party made camp not far from a large marsh that stank of sulfur. Scouts were dispatched to explore the swamp, which was at the juncture of several major game trails. They soon returned laden with an assortment of astonishingly large bones and tusks. When the main party hurried down the trail to investigate, they discovered a natural graveyard—a fetid, muddy wetland piled with enormous skeletons.
For the next several decades, the bones and teeth retrieved from “Big Bone Lick,” as it came to be called, fueled the controversy over the incognitum. Benjamin Franklin, serving as a colonial emissary in London in the 1750s and 1760s, joined in the debate as to whether these remains were from some species of carnivore. Dissimilarities between the grinding teeth of the incognitum and the molars of elephants convinced some naturalists that the animal was indeed a meat-eater. Franklin thought so too at first, but in the end sided with those who argued it must have been an herbivore because its tremendous size would have made the incognitum too slow and awkward to pursue prey. Interest in the fossils remained so high that during the Revolutionary War George Washington took time to dig up ancient bones at several battlefield sites.
It was just before the end of the war that the governor of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, along with the other governors of the new states, received a questionnaire from the French ambassador asking for a summary of natural resources and political institutions in America. Only Jefferson found time to respond, although it took him five years to do so. His response came in the form of a slim book, Notes on the State of Virginia, which had developed into a more elaborate reply than the ambassador probably expected. The book marked a transition in the approach to natural science in the New World and would eventually precipitate a revolution in American thought about the land it was overspreading.
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