At the end of the War of Independence, Jefferson began to write Notes on the State of Virginia (the only book he ever published) in which the flora and fauna of the United States became the foot-soldiers in his battle against Buffon. Operating on a theory that bigger means better, Jefferson listed the tallest American trees and provided the weights of bears, buffalos and panthers. Even the weasel, Jefferson wrote, was “larger in America than in Europe.”
To drive his point home, Jefferson included a long table ‘A Comparative View of the Quadrupeds of Europe and of America’ in the Notes. His next scientific weapons were the bones of the “mammoth”—the mastodon—which had been found in North America. Buffon claimed that the mastodon was just a larger elephant and that it was extinct but Jefferson insisted that these giant animals still roamed somewhere in the unexplored West. According to him they were stronger and more ferocious than any other animal in Europe. Its size made the mastodon the perfect symbol for the young nation. Years later, Jefferson would instruct Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to find them during their great expedition West.
Jefferson was not the first American to take up the dispute. In the early 1780s, while living in Paris, Benjamin Franklin had attended a dinner party together with Abbé Raynal, one of the scientists who believed in the theory of degeneracy. Franklin noted that all the American guests were sitting on one side of the table with the French opposite. Seizing the opportunity, he said: “Let both parties rise, and we will see on which side nature had degenerated.” As it happened all the Americans were of the “finest stature,” Franklin later told Jefferson, while the French were all diminutive—in particular Raynal who was “a mere shrimp.”
Jefferson was so obsessed “to convince Mons. Buffon of his mistake” that he brought a large panther skin from America to France in preparation for his fight. During a dinner shortly after his arrival, Jefferson boasted to Buffon that the Scandinavian reindeer was so small that it “could walk under the belly of our moose.” Determined to prove his point, he then asked friends and acquaintances to send him details of ‘the heaviest weights of our animals . . . from the mouse to the mammoth.’