PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 89 



some characteristics in the formation of the animal which BufTon 

 stoutly denied. Whereupon Mr. Jefferson wrote from Paris to 

 General John Sullivan, then residing in Durham, New Hamp 

 shire, to procure and send him the whole frame of a moose. The 

 General was no little astonished at a request he deemed so ex 

 traordinary, but well acquainted with Mr. Jefferson, he knew he 

 must have sufficient reason for it ; so he made a hunting party of 

 his neighbors and took the field. They captured a moose of 

 unusual proportions, stripped it to the bone, and sent the skeleton 

 to Mr. Jefferson at a cost of fifty pounds sterling. On its arrival, 

 Mr. Jefferson invited Buffon and some other savants to a supper 

 at his house and exhibited his dear bought specimen. Buffon 

 immediately acknowledged his error. ' I should have consulted 

 you, Monsieur,' he said, ' before publishing my book on Natural 

 History, and then I should have been sure of my facts.' " 



In still another matter in which he was at variance with Buffon 

 he was manifestly in the right. In a letter to President Madison, 

 of William and Mary College, he wrote : 



44 Speaking one day with M. de Buffon on the present ardor of 

 chemical inquiry, he affected to consider chemistry but as cookery, 

 and to place the toils of the laboratory on a footing with those of 

 the kitchen, /think it, on the contrary, among the most useful 

 of sciences and big with future discoveries for the utility and 

 safety of the human race." 



It was the scientific foresight of Jefferson, so manifest in such 

 letters, which led him to advocate so vigorously the idea that 

 science must be the corner-stone of our Republic. 



In 1789 he wrote from Paris to Dr. Willard, president of Har 

 vard College : 



To Dr. WILLARD : 



What a field have we at our doors to signalize ourselves in. 

 The botany of America is far from being exhausted, its miner 

 alogy is untouched, and its Natural History or zoology totally 

 mistaken and misrepresented. * * * It is for such institutions 

 as that over which you preside so worthily, sir, to do justice to 

 our country, its productions, and its genius. It is the work to 

 which the young men you are forming should lay their hands. 

 We have spent the prime of our lives in procuring them the 

 precious blessing of liberty. Let them spend theirs in showing 

 that it is the great parent of science and of virtue, and.that a 

 nation will be great in both always in proportion as it is free. 



THOMAS JEFFERSON. 



