I participated in a PowerPoint party where everyone chose a topic and gave a presentation with hand drawn illustrations.

My topic was about a time in 1787 where Thomas Jefferson was trying to recruit people from France to move to the “new world” but a well known naturalist, Count Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon wrote a book saying the America “was a diminished, second rate ‘degenerate’ copy of Europe despite never being there.

Buffon continued on to say the Americas were too damp and and the air is not hearty enough to produce biodiversity, large animals, or quality crops. He even said children would grow up to small and weak if raised on American soil.

Thomas Jefferson took great offense to this and told Buffon about the great American Moose and how large they are. No one in Europe has seen anything so large. To prove Buffon wrong, he had a moose killed and sent to Paris. However, it wasn’t taxidermied or preserved, so it was received somewhat poorly. However, it WAS acknowledged that it was a very large and impressive specimen.