Post by cjm on Oct 6, 2014 6:27:55 GMT
Bill Bryson: A Short History of Nearly Everything , Black Swan (2004), p109 et seq
…
6 SCIENCE RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW
IN 1787, SOMEONE in New Jersey - exactly who now seems to be forgotten found an
enormous thighbone sticking out of a stream bank at a place called Woodbury Creek. The
bone clearly didn’t belong to any species of creature still alive, certainly not in New
Jersey. From what little is known now, it is thought to have belonged to a hadrosaur, a large
duck billed dinosaur. At the time, dinosaurs were unknown.
The bone was sent to Dr. Caspar Wistar, the nation’s leading anatomist, who described it at
a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia that autumn. Unfortunately,
Wistar failed completely to recognize the bone’s significance and merely made a few cautious
and uninspired remarks to the effect that it was indeed a whopper. He thus missed the chance,
half a century ahead of anyone else, to be the discoverer of dinosaurs. Indeed, the bone
excited so little interest that it was put in a storeroom and eventually disappeared
altogether. So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost.
That the bone didn’t attract greater interest is more than a little puzzling, for its
appearance came at a time when America was in a froth of excitement about the remains of
large, ancient animals. The cause of this froth was a strange assertion by the great French
naturalist the Comte de Buffon - he of the heated spheres from the previous chapter - that
living things in the New World were inferior in nearly every way to those of the Old World.
America, Buffon wrote in his vast and much- esteemed Histoire Naturelle , was a land
where the water was stagnant, the soil unproductive, and the animals without size or vigor,
their constitutions weakened by the “noxious vapors” that rose from its rotting swamps and
sunless forests. In such an environment even the native Indians lacked virility. “They have
no beard or body hair,” Buffon sagely confided, “and no ardor for the female.” Their
reproductive organs were “small and feeble.”
Buffon’s observations found surprisingly eager support among other writers, especially
those whose conclusions were not complicated by actual familiarity with the country. A
Dutchman named Comeille de Pauw announced in a popular work called Recherches
Philosophiques sur les Américains that native American males were not only
reproductively unimposing, but “so lacking in virility that they had milk in their breasts.”
Such views enjoyed an improbable durability and could be found repeated or echoed in European
texts till near the end of the nineteenth century.
Not surprisingly, such aspersions were indignantly met in America. Thomas Jefferson
incorporated a furious (and, unless the context is understood, quite bewildering) rebuttal in
his Notes on the State of Virginia , and induced his New Hampshire friend General John Sullivan
to send twenty soldiers into the northern woods to find a bull moose to present to Buffon as
proof of the stature and majesty of American quadrupeds. It took the men two weeks to track
down a suitable subject. The moose, when shot, unfortunately lacked the imposing horns that
Jefferson had specified, but Sullivan thoughtfully included a rack of antlers from an elk or
stag with the suggestion that these be attached instead. Who in France, after all, would know?
Meanwhile in Philadelphia - Wistar’s city - naturalists had begun to assemble the bones of
a giant elephant-like creature known at first as “the great American incognitum” but later
identified, not quite correctly, as a mammoth. The first of these bones had been discovered at
a place called Big Bone Lick in Kentucky, but soon others were turning up all over. America,
it appeared, had once been the home of a truly substantial creature one that would surely
disprove Buffon’s foolish Gallic contentions.
In their keenness to demonstrate the incognitum’s bulk and ferocity, the American
naturalists appear to have become slightly carried away. They overestimated its size by a
factor of six and gave it frightening claws, which in fact came from a Megalonyx, or giant
ground sloth, found nearby. Rather remarkably, they persuaded themselves that the animal
had enjoyed “the agility and ferocity of the tiger,” and portrayed it in illustrations as
pouncing with feline grace onto prey from boulders. When tusks were discovered, they were
forced into the animal’s head in any number of inventive ways. One restorer screwed the tusks
in upside down, like the fangs of a saber-toothed cat, which gave it a satisfyingly aggressive
aspect. Another arranged the tusks so that they curved backwards on the engaging theory that
the creature had been aquatic and had used them to anchor itself to trees while dozing. The
most pertinent consideration about the incognitum, however, was that it appeared to be
extinct- a fact that Buffon cheerfully seized upon as proof of its incontestably degenerate
nature.
Buffon died in 1788, but the controversy rolled on. In 1795 a selection of bones made their
way to Paris, where they were examined by the rising star of paleontology, the youthful and
aristocratic Georges Cuvier. Cuvier was already dazzling people with his genius for taking
heaps of disarticulated bones and whipping them into shapely forms. It was said that he could
describe the look and nature of an animal from a single tooth or scrap of jaw, and often name
the species and genus into the bargain. Realizing that no one in America had thought to write
a formal description of the lumbering beast, Cuvier did so, and thus
became its official discoverer. He called it a mastodon (which means, a touch
unexpectedly, “nipple-teeth”).
Inspired by the controversy, in 1796 Cuvier wrote a landmark paper, Note on the Species of
Living and Fossil Elephants, in which he put forward for the first time a formal theory of
extinctions. His belief was that from time to time the Earth experienced global catastrophes in
which groups of creatures were wiped out. For religious people, including Cuvier himself, the
idea raised uncomfortable implications since it suggested an unaccountable casualness on the
part of Providence. To what end would God create species only to wipe them out later? The
notion was contrary to the belief in the Great Chain of Being, which held that the world was
carefully ordered and that every living thing within it had a place and purpose, and always had
and always would. Jefferson for one couldn’t abide the thought that whole species would ever
be permitted to vanish (or, come to that, to evolve). So when it was put to him that there
might be scientific and political value in sending a party to explore the interior of America
beyond the Mississippi he leapt at the idea, hoping the intrepid adventurers would find herds
of healthy mastodons and other outsized creatures grazing on the bounteous plains.
Jefferson’s personal secretary and trusted friend Meriwether Lewis was chosen co-leader and
chief naturalist for the expedition. The person selected to advise him on what to look out for
with regard to animals living and deceased was none other than Caspar Wistar.
…
…
6 SCIENCE RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW
IN 1787, SOMEONE in New Jersey - exactly who now seems to be forgotten found an
enormous thighbone sticking out of a stream bank at a place called Woodbury Creek. The
bone clearly didn’t belong to any species of creature still alive, certainly not in New
Jersey. From what little is known now, it is thought to have belonged to a hadrosaur, a large
duck billed dinosaur. At the time, dinosaurs were unknown.
The bone was sent to Dr. Caspar Wistar, the nation’s leading anatomist, who described it at
a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia that autumn. Unfortunately,
Wistar failed completely to recognize the bone’s significance and merely made a few cautious
and uninspired remarks to the effect that it was indeed a whopper. He thus missed the chance,
half a century ahead of anyone else, to be the discoverer of dinosaurs. Indeed, the bone
excited so little interest that it was put in a storeroom and eventually disappeared
altogether. So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost.
That the bone didn’t attract greater interest is more than a little puzzling, for its
appearance came at a time when America was in a froth of excitement about the remains of
large, ancient animals. The cause of this froth was a strange assertion by the great French
naturalist the Comte de Buffon - he of the heated spheres from the previous chapter - that
living things in the New World were inferior in nearly every way to those of the Old World.
America, Buffon wrote in his vast and much- esteemed Histoire Naturelle , was a land
where the water was stagnant, the soil unproductive, and the animals without size or vigor,
their constitutions weakened by the “noxious vapors” that rose from its rotting swamps and
sunless forests. In such an environment even the native Indians lacked virility. “They have
no beard or body hair,” Buffon sagely confided, “and no ardor for the female.” Their
reproductive organs were “small and feeble.”
Buffon’s observations found surprisingly eager support among other writers, especially
those whose conclusions were not complicated by actual familiarity with the country. A
Dutchman named Comeille de Pauw announced in a popular work called Recherches
Philosophiques sur les Américains that native American males were not only
reproductively unimposing, but “so lacking in virility that they had milk in their breasts.”
Such views enjoyed an improbable durability and could be found repeated or echoed in European
texts till near the end of the nineteenth century.
Not surprisingly, such aspersions were indignantly met in America. Thomas Jefferson
incorporated a furious (and, unless the context is understood, quite bewildering) rebuttal in
his Notes on the State of Virginia , and induced his New Hampshire friend General John Sullivan
to send twenty soldiers into the northern woods to find a bull moose to present to Buffon as
proof of the stature and majesty of American quadrupeds. It took the men two weeks to track
down a suitable subject. The moose, when shot, unfortunately lacked the imposing horns that
Jefferson had specified, but Sullivan thoughtfully included a rack of antlers from an elk or
stag with the suggestion that these be attached instead. Who in France, after all, would know?
Meanwhile in Philadelphia - Wistar’s city - naturalists had begun to assemble the bones of
a giant elephant-like creature known at first as “the great American incognitum” but later
identified, not quite correctly, as a mammoth. The first of these bones had been discovered at
a place called Big Bone Lick in Kentucky, but soon others were turning up all over. America,
it appeared, had once been the home of a truly substantial creature one that would surely
disprove Buffon’s foolish Gallic contentions.
In their keenness to demonstrate the incognitum’s bulk and ferocity, the American
naturalists appear to have become slightly carried away. They overestimated its size by a
factor of six and gave it frightening claws, which in fact came from a Megalonyx, or giant
ground sloth, found nearby. Rather remarkably, they persuaded themselves that the animal
had enjoyed “the agility and ferocity of the tiger,” and portrayed it in illustrations as
pouncing with feline grace onto prey from boulders. When tusks were discovered, they were
forced into the animal’s head in any number of inventive ways. One restorer screwed the tusks
in upside down, like the fangs of a saber-toothed cat, which gave it a satisfyingly aggressive
aspect. Another arranged the tusks so that they curved backwards on the engaging theory that
the creature had been aquatic and had used them to anchor itself to trees while dozing. The
most pertinent consideration about the incognitum, however, was that it appeared to be
extinct- a fact that Buffon cheerfully seized upon as proof of its incontestably degenerate
nature.
Buffon died in 1788, but the controversy rolled on. In 1795 a selection of bones made their
way to Paris, where they were examined by the rising star of paleontology, the youthful and
aristocratic Georges Cuvier. Cuvier was already dazzling people with his genius for taking
heaps of disarticulated bones and whipping them into shapely forms. It was said that he could
describe the look and nature of an animal from a single tooth or scrap of jaw, and often name
the species and genus into the bargain. Realizing that no one in America had thought to write
a formal description of the lumbering beast, Cuvier did so, and thus
became its official discoverer. He called it a mastodon (which means, a touch
unexpectedly, “nipple-teeth”).
Inspired by the controversy, in 1796 Cuvier wrote a landmark paper, Note on the Species of
Living and Fossil Elephants, in which he put forward for the first time a formal theory of
extinctions. His belief was that from time to time the Earth experienced global catastrophes in
which groups of creatures were wiped out. For religious people, including Cuvier himself, the
idea raised uncomfortable implications since it suggested an unaccountable casualness on the
part of Providence. To what end would God create species only to wipe them out later? The
notion was contrary to the belief in the Great Chain of Being, which held that the world was
carefully ordered and that every living thing within it had a place and purpose, and always had
and always would. Jefferson for one couldn’t abide the thought that whole species would ever
be permitted to vanish (or, come to that, to evolve). So when it was put to him that there
might be scientific and political value in sending a party to explore the interior of America
beyond the Mississippi he leapt at the idea, hoping the intrepid adventurers would find herds
of healthy mastodons and other outsized creatures grazing on the bounteous plains.
Jefferson’s personal secretary and trusted friend Meriwether Lewis was chosen co-leader and
chief naturalist for the expedition. The person selected to advise him on what to look out for
with regard to animals living and deceased was none other than Caspar Wistar.
…
