While most of us are aware that President Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and commissioned the Lewis & Clark Expedition(among several other exploratory treks West), not all of us know that Jefferson was also a naturalist and author............. To debunk the European premise that American fauna and flora were inferior to those of Old World origen, he penned NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA in which flora and fauna of the USA became the foot-soldiers against the alleged superiority claims of the European Elitist Class............"Operating on a theory that bigger means better, Jefferson listed the tallest American trees and provided the weights of bears, bison and panthers"........."Even the weasel, Jefferson wrote, was larger in America than in Europe"............"Over the next decades and buoyed by(Jefferson's tomb) and the North American continent’s scale, Americans invested nature with patriotic sentiment".............."The Rockies were more impressive than the Alps, they insisted, just as John Adams declared the river Thames ‘but a rivulet’ compared to the majestic Hudson"............"Primeval forests, vast plains, and huge waterfalls were linked to the national character and to the uniqueness of America"................" The very wildness of America’s rugged mountains and glorious forests was the embodiment of a nation that had freed itself from the shackles of tyranny".............."America, Jefferson claimed, was made on an improved plan, while Europe was only “a first idea, a crude production, before the maker knew his trade"

Andrea Wulf; 3/7/16

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/03/jefferson-american-dream/471696/

Thomas Jefferson's Quest to Prove America's Natural Superiority

French theorists said that American native species were inferior to European plants and animals—the former President went to great lengths to show that they were wrong.


Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) is a book written by Thomas Jefferson.
 He completed the first version in 1781, and updated and enlarged the book
 in 1782 and 1783. ... John Stockdale published the book in its first English 
edition in 1787 in London