Michaelis was already acquainted with Camper through Michaelis’s father. Because Michaelis had handled so many bones of the Ohio animal, Camper was inclined to defer to his authority. Some of Michaelis’s conclusions were solid. He rejected Daubenton’s idea that the American bones were those of elephants mixed together. He also rejected Hunter’s idea that the teeth indicated a carnivore. He believed that the bones and teeth represented one unknown animal. These were not particularly controversial opinions; it was one final assertion that got him in trouble. One of the bones in Morgan’s collection was a piece of an upper jaw consisting of the palate and three teeth. Michaelis looked at it backward, thinking the back was the front. From that angle, he decided that there was no room for tusks on the animal. For no particular reason—he hadn’t seen the front of a skull—he also decided it hadn’t had a trunk. And if that wasn’t enough, he declared that it and the Siberian mammoth were the same tuskless, trunkless animal, meaning there was no explanation for the many tons of ivory coming out of Siberia each year.
On his return to Germany, Michaelis sent Camper a bone and a set of Peale’s drawings. Camper had already spent some time studying the Ohio animal and owned a tusk of one. He had visited the British museum and studied their bones. Through his study, he had come to a series of correct conclusions about the animal: it was a separate species from the elephant and the hippo, it had tusks and a trunk, and, like Franklin, he saw that the teeth were suited to a browsing herbivore. Despite his superior knowledge, Michaelis completely convinced him, and Camper even went so far as to publish a paper recanting his former views. Despite this, Camper wasn’t done with the topic. In 1784, he offered to buy Morgan’s collection so he could examine them himself. Morgan refused, having decided they should stay in the country where they had been found. Three years later, a visitor from Philadelphia, Samuel Vaughan, convinced Camper to make another offer. This time, Morgan agreed. He was old, he wrote, and would never make a detailed study of the bones himself. He was impressed by Camper’s reputation and knew he would do them justice. Vaughan oversaw the details of shipping the bones. By now, Camper was also an old man. He died just weeks after the bones arrived in Amsterdam.
When Pallas traveled in Siberia between 1768 and 1774, he brought something to that part of the world that none of his predecessors had; he was a geologist in the modern sense of the word. Messerschmidt, Tatishchev, Strahlenberg, Müller, and Gmelin had all studied minerals, but they did so with an eye toward locating exploitable metal ores, instead of studying minerals within the context of the earth itself. The word “geology” was still new, and Pallas was the first to make an extensive study of the landforms of Siberia. In particular, he studied the Ural and Altai Mountains and developed a general theory of mountain chains. He published the first draft of his theory at the same time he was corresponding with Camper about rhinos and a slightly updated version in 1782. The cores of mountain chains, he writes, are great masses of granite that were once islands in a world-covering ocean. The peaks, where the granite cores are most exposed, existed before life appeared on earth. As we move down slope, the land grows younger and maritime fossils begin to appear. Finally, on the plains, fossils of plants and land animals become common. The modern world was not formed only by erosion of these first mountain cores. Periodic massive volcanic events raise major islands and chains. These are so sudden that they displace entire seas, which flood across the adjacent dry land. One such event could have created the Philippines and Japan and swept elephants, rhinoceroses, and buffalo into cold Siberia, where they were buried by sediment and frozen. Pallas’s theory was a grander version of Steno’s and Leibniz’s theories, and it gave the earth a complicated history that took time to unfold. He avoided making a definite statement about the age of the earth, but the implication that it was older than five to seven thousand years was inescapable.
When Buffon began to write his Natural History in 1749, he prefaced it with a volume describing the history of the earth up to the advent of humanity. His theory covered a broad scope in which uncounted thousands of years of geological change occurred, with humans only showing up at the end. The French religious authorities were not amused. Four years later, he was compelled to issue an apology and recant his position in the introduction to the fourth volume. Twenty-five years later, in 1778, his own authority as the most respected thinker in Europe had enough weight that he was able to issue a new and improved version of his theory without official opposition. This new volume, called Epochs of Nature, divided earth history into seven epochs. Humanity inhabited only the last period. In the first epoch, a comet grazed the sun, throwing a small part of its mass into space. During the second epoch, globs of this mass cooled to become the planets. During the third, the glob that was the earth cooled to the point where water precipitated and covered the whole surface. The first life, in the form of shellfish, appeared and covered the ocean floor. During the fourth, dry land appeared as part of the oceans drained into deep caverns in the earth, revealing seashell-covered land, and volcanoes threw up great mountain ranges. During the fifth epoch, plants and land animals appeared in the far north, including Siberia. Prominent among these lifeforms were elephants and rhinoceroses. These were so important to his theory that the chapter about the fifth epoch is titled “When elephants and other animals of the South inhabited lands of the North.”
Buffon used the observations of Steno, Leibniz, Pallas, and others to put together a generalized global sequence of strata, which addressed the presence of maritime seashells on mountaintops and far from the seas. These were laid down in primal seas of the third epoch and later thrust up with the creation of moutains during the fourth. In his scheme, heat was the key to the formation of the earth and to the distribution of life upon it. Buffon believed life was an emergent quality of matter and would appear wherever and whenever conditions allowed. Life appeared first in the seas once the earth cooled to the point that water precipitated on the surface. Plants and land animals appeared in the farthest north, because that was the area of the earth that cooled first. The first animals were tropical in nature. As the earth cooled and the habitable zone moved south, these tropical animals moved south with it. New lifeforms appeared to occupy the cooler, vacant regions north of the receding tropics. These lifeforms were inferior and possessed less vigor than their tropical predecessors. Buffon felt this narrative nicely explained the vast amounts of ivory coming out of Siberia. The problem of explaining it had become more acute since Ivan Lyakhov had explored the islands that now bear his name. Lyakhov first visited the islands in 1750 and noted that there was so much ivory that it was as if the islands were made of it. After Catherine came to power and granted him a monopoly on exploiting the islands, his agents began to bringing enormous amounts of the precious substance to market. Buffon thought it was now impossible to explain the presence of elephants in the north by any one-time occurrence like stray armies or even the Deluge. For him, the only possible solution was that elephants had inhabited Siberia for a very long time.
Buffon was prepared to take a somewhat qualified stand over the age of the earth. When he was still simply Georges Leclerc, he purchased the village of Buffon, which his father had once owned. There he built an arms factory that made him a wealthy man and that provided him with a workshop to pursue his scientific interests. To test his idea of the cooling earth, he had his workshop heat various sized iron spheres (cannonballs) until they were red hot. He then timed their cooling until they were, first, safe to touch and, second, cool enough for things to grow on them, in his opinion. He does not record who did the actual hot cannonball touching or if they received a bonus in their paycheck for the job. After he was satisfied that he knew the rate of cooling for iron, he experimented with mixed materials that he thought better approximated the actual makeup of the earth. Once he had completed his experiments, he arrived at the astonishing conclusion that the earth must be three million years old. Though he was no nonger afraid of the religious authotiti
es, he feared this was too much to ask his scientific colleagues to accept. Buffon agonized over these numbers for years before publishing Epochs of Nature. When he finally did publish, he reduced all of his estimations to their lowest possible values and estimated the age of the earth at 75,000 years. Even so, this was ten times older than the largest religious estimate.
Buffon’s theory also provided a means to put mammoths and hippos in North America, although he still held on to his and Daubenton’s identification of mastodon teeth as belonging to giant hippos. Buffon wrote that violent actions of the fourth epoch that had drained away most of the original ocean and thrust up the great mountain chains didn’t end with that epoch; they had only become less common. To account for the modern distribution of species, Buffon also theorized that the configuration of the continents had changed since they first appeared. With the possible exception of South America, they had all been connected at one time making it easier for the first animals to move south. Before Gibraltar and the Bosporus opened, the Mediterranean was a series of lakes that elephants could easily pass on their way from Europe to Africa. He also believed that while it was likely that the Aral, Caspian, and Black Seas had once been connected, draining part of the water into the Mediterranean, and evaporating another part cleared the way for another group of elephants to migrate to India. For North American elephants, Buffon’s problem wasn’t so much getting them there—the northern parts of the continent reached the same latitude as Siberia—as separating North America from Eurasia. The great caverns into which much of the original ocean had drained were subject to occasional collapses. He suggested several regions as candidates for new seas created this way. One was the western Pacific. Another was the Bering Strait. A third was the entire North Atlantic. The Bering route would have been the easiest way to get elephants to Ohio, but he was rather fond of an Atlantic route from Europe to Britain to the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, and Canada. He also suggested a southern route to Florida from Spain, to Atlantis, the Azores, and the Greater Antilles. Although he doesn’t mention it, the northern Atlantic route was the same as the one suggested by Molyneux to get the Irish elk, which he thought was the same as a moose, to the British Isles.
Buffon’s theory of the earth was not widely embraced, even though, to our modern minds, he was dancing around the right ideas with regard to continental drift. Unfortunately for Buffon, grand theories such as his had gone out of style in favor of specific research that produced measurable results. But though it was not widely embraced, it did not receive wide censure, either, minus the initial attack from the church authorities. His theory did, however, grievously offend one person: Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson wasn’t particularly upset by the geological parts of Buffon’s theory. It was the fact that Buffon wrote that new lifeforms that appeared in the north were inferior and possessed less vigor than their tropical predecessors. This wasn’t a result of appearing later; it was because they lived in a colder climate. This inferiority wasn’t limited to later developing lifeforms per se. Superior, older breeds would degenerate if they moved to cooler climates. Between the first and second presentations of his theory of the earth, he developed this idea and specifically pointed at North America as an example of this degeneration. Buffon made his most offensive comments in the ninth volume of Natural History (1761) following the article on the lion. One essay in the volume, “Dissertation on Animals Peculiar to the Old World,” points out the grand animals of the Old World that are not to be found in the New. America has nothing that can compare to the elephants, rhinoceroses, and tigers east of the Atlantic. In “Dissertation on Animals Peculiar to the New World,” he claims the Americas have few unique animals. Most that are there are degenerate forms of Old World animals. The few that are unique are noxious animals like snakes, insects, and frogs. In Buffon’s imagination, the entire New World was one environment, a cold, damp forest with wild rivers and few signs of human enterprise. While the Europeans in America grew weak and lazy, the natives showed the final end of human degeneration: “In the savage, the organs of generation are small and feeble. He has no hair, no beard, no ardour for the female. . . . Their heart is frozen, their society cold, and their empire cruel. . . . They have few children, and pay little attention to them. They are indifferent, because they are weak.” In the following years, Buffon toned down his criticism and, by the time he wrote Epochs, used only South America to illustrate degeneracy. But the damage was done. Epochs was not read as widely as the earlier volumes, and, in the intervening years, the idea of American degeneracy—for both animals and humans—had been enthusiastically and vocally embraced by many European writers.
Jefferson wasn’t alone in his understandable offense. Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and both John and Abigail Adams all expressed their displeasure, but Jefferson was especially inflamed. Through war and revolution, he would hang on to the slight until he finally found the right medium to respond in 1780. It would lead to the only book he published in his lifetime. The opportunity came in the form of a simple questionnaire from François, marquis de Barbé-Marbois. Marbois, the secretary of the French legation in the rebelling American colonies, was assigned to gather information on the individual states with an eye toward trade opportunities. In Virginia, he presented the questionnaire to Joseph Jones, Madison’s uncle, who forwarded it to Jefferson, who he rightly assumed was the most knowledgeable person in the dominion on matters of resources and natural history. Jefferson’s response was slightly delayed by the British invasion of Virginia, but he was able to present Barbé-Marbois with a book-length response by the end of 1781. The longest portion of the book is his answer to query 6, which asked him to describe the “productions, trees, plants, fruits, and other natural riches” of Virginia. In it, he spends several pages describing the mammoth, by which he means the Ohio animal. Based on the traditions of several eastern Indian nations, which described it a monstrous and deadly bison, and his own rejection of extinction, Jefferson was sure that the animal still roamed in unexplored regions northwest of Virginia. He described it as being six times the size of modern elephants and therefore far greater than anything the Old World had to offer. After the war, he presented a small number of friends with handwritten copies of his book. Others heard about it and asked for copies, which Jefferson had printed in Paris, where he took up his new position as the American minister plenipotentiary.
In Paris, Jefferson very anxiously looked for an opportunity to meet Buffon and debate him. He had with him the tanned pelt of a large cougar that he hoped to present to the now quite old naturalist as a way of redeeming the honor of American cats. He had instructed his friends back home to hunt for a very large moose to have stuffed and sent to him. While he waited for the moose, he sent Buffon the cougar skin with his compliments. The French savant sent him a terse note of thanks and an invitation to dinner. Jefferson wrote that the dinner was quite pleasant and that, rather than enter into an argument, Buffon presented him with a copy of his just-published Epochs. After dinner, Buffon conceded that the cougar skin proved American cats were just as impressive as their Old World counterparts. When the moose finally arrived, Jefferson sent it to Buffon, who finally relented. In a note from his secretary, he promised to make corrections in future editions. There would be no future editions. Buffon died six months later.
By the last decade of the eighteenth century, Karl Linné’s system for classifying living things had become widely used throughout the Western world This is not to say it wasn’t controversial. Buffon, in particular, had hated it. He believed that all attempts to classify living things above the level of species were arbitrary and unnatural. Linné’s system was based on a strict hierarchy that categorized plants and animals according certain characteristics. One of the most fundamental divisions was their means of reproduction. According to Linné, mammals are characterized by, among other things, live birth, as opposed to eggs. Buffon preferred a version of the ideas of Leibniz that species had a certain flexibility to
adapt and change and even reverse that change, without becoming a new species. Linné defined species by structure; Buffon preferred to define them by utility. The highest category of animals was domesticated animals. Within that category, horeses and dogs held pride of place. Next came other domesticated animals in France. Domesticated animals in other parts of the world came in a distant third place.
Whether Linné’s system was unnatural or not, it was useful. The Siberian explorers Messerschmidt, Steller, and Gmelin each brought back hundreds of new plant species to be cataloged. The workers at the Kunstkammera needed something like the Linnean system to make sense of these vast collections, and thus it was quickly embraced. The most important controversies about Linné’s system concerned how to use it and fill it in. Which features of living things were the most important criteria to use in classification, and how should they be ranked? After he dropped the mineral kingdom from his system, Linné had very little use for fossils that couldn’t be matched to living species. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach worked on all fronts of the Linnaean system: He added new species, he challenged the criteria for classification, and he added fossils to the system.
Discovering the Mammoth Page 21
