HARD TIMES AT MONTICELLO - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 119

Figure 9.3. This portrait of Thomas Jefferson from 1821 captures the emotional traumas of the third
president's final years, dominated by the destructive sequence of bad weather, crop failure, and economic
turmoil that crippled the Atlantic states in the post-Tambora period. (© Thomas Jefferson Foundation at
Monticello. Photo: Edward Owen.)
Figure 9.4. A portrait of the Comte de Buffon early in his glittering career, to commemorate his 1753
election to the Académie Française. Fittingly—given Buffon's status as one of the last intellectual lions
of the French ancien régime—the portrait hangs today in the royal palace of Versailles. (© RMN/Art Re-
source, New York.)
The great loser in this uneven thermal distribution, it turns out, was America. According
to Buffon, “in such a situation is the continent of America placed, and so formed, that
everything concurs to diminish the action of heat.” Buffon's grand, multivolume Histoire
Naturelle (1749-88) drew strong criticism from the French clergy for its scant references to
a divine plan in nature. In the fledgling republic of the United States, however, controversy
raged over Buffon's explicit anticolonial ecology, in particular the supposed “degeneration”
of New World species under a relentlessly cold climate regime. From his study in the secluded
village of Montbard—the headquarters of European natural science in the late eighteenth
century—Buffon assessed the numbers, variety, and size of species collected from the distant
Americas and concluded that in the New World “animated nature … is less active, less var-
ied, and even less vigorous.” This affliction extended to the native human population, whose