on the State of Virginia, written just after he left the state’s governorship,
Jefferson concocted his own version of the incognitum. The animal was, he
maintained with Buffon, the largest of all beasts—“five or six times the
cubic volume of the elephant.” (This would disprove the theory, popular
in Europe at the time, that the animals of the New World were smaller and
more “degenerate” than those of the Old.) The creature, Jefferson agreed
with Hunter, was probably carnivorous. But it was still out there
somewhere. If it could not be found in Virginia, it was roaming those parts
of the continent that “remain in their aboriginal state, unexplored and
undisturbed.” When, as president, he dispatched Meriwether Lewis and
William Clark to the Northwest, Jefferson hoped that they would come
upon live incognita roaming its forests.
“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.”
CUVIER arrived in Paris in early 1795, half a century after the remains
from the Ohio Valley had reached the city. He was twenty-five years old,
with wide-set gray eyes, a prominent nose, and a temperament one friend
compared to the exterior of the earth—generally cool but capable of
violent tremors and eruptions. Cuvier had grown up in a small town on
the Swiss border and had few contacts in the capital. Nevertheless, he had
managed to secure a prestigious position there, thanks to the passing of
the ancien régime on the one hand and his own sublime self-regard on the
other. An older colleague would later describe him as popping up in Paris
“like a mushroom.”
Cuvier’s job at Paris’s Museum of Natural History—the democratic
successor to the king’s cabinet—was, officially, to teach. But in his spare
time, he delved into the museum’s collection. He spent long hours
studying the bones that Longueuil had sent to Louis XV, comparing them
with other specimens. On April 4, 1796—or, according to the