Today I learned

1. Linneaus (Carl von Linné), the famous naturalist/botanist, argued in one of his books that animals have souls: "One should not vent one's wrath on animals, Theology decrees that man has a soul and that the animals are mere 'aoutomata mechanica,' but I believe they would be better advised that animals have a soul and that the difference is of nobility."

Though I'm not sure if he was arguing that animals' souls were less or more noble than ours, and frankly, looking at my fellow humans some days, I WONDER.


2. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, ascribed to the general French theory* of the "inferiority of the Americas" and basically he said that - to use internet terminology - everything in North America was virgins to Europe's Chads, and that when European plants were taken over to North America, they grew poorly because the soil was bad, etc., etc.

(*I wonder if maybe some of this bias hasn't stereotypically continued down to our own times)

From the Wikipedia article on him: "At one point, Buffon propounded a theory that nature in the New World was inferior to that of Eurasia. He argued that the Americas were lacking in large and powerful creatures, and that even the people were less virile than their European counterparts. He ascribed this inferiority to the marsh odors and the dense forests of the American continent."   


Well, about the same time, Thomas Jefferson was in France, and he was having none of that. So he arranged - or tried to arrange - to have a moose caught (the "biggest bull moose" his military men could find) and preserved and SENT TO FRANCE so he could show Leclerc how wrong he was. (It...didn't go well)

Jefferson also argued that mammoths (the bones of which had been found, and which Leclerc apparently sniffed at because they were extinct) "probably" still existed somewhere in the unexplored western region of the continent. (And also that the reindeer Leclerc spoke so highly of were small enough to walk under the belly of a bull moose)

here is an article from "The Atlantic" about their, what Linda Belcher would call, "peeing race." (and what I have called "micturational combat").

On the one hand: yes, I suppose many would argue for the "cancellation" of Leclerc today because this was apparently only one of the wrong and silly things he believed (and one of the less harmful, apparently). I dunno. I like just being able to laugh at it and show how "extra" people could get about things like this. And also maybe a reminder that pigheadedness isn't just a 21st (or even 20th) century invention.

I also kind of admit I'd like to see either a comic movie, or a short novel, dramatizing these events. I dunno. I suppose if something comparable were happening today I'd be irritated and dismayed, but given that remove of time, it's....just kind of funny to me, to think of this French-aristocrat famous-naturalist and Thomas Jefferson arguing about the "virility" of North America. (And of course note that South America, Africa, and Asia are mostly left out of the discussion)

(ha ha ha ha: I referred to this on Twitter and one of my friends over there commented "'[Forget] you, I'm mailing you a moose,' is, to be fair, one of the more creative responses to a bunch of French people saying you have small critters")