As certainly and unequivocally as Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica was intended to defend his Church’s dogmas, so was Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia intended to defend the reputation of his country. As soon as it was published, Jefferson began to distribute it to selected Parisian men of high social standing. One of these, the Marquis de Chastellux, received also a cover letter that was clearly a polemic in defense of a polemic. The Notes were compiled as a refutation of the views of the French mathematician Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, “on the general question of the degeneracy of animals in America.” They were also a response to claims of the Abbé Raynal, “as to the degeneracy of the man of Europe transplanted to America.”1 It was fundamentally and deliberately patriotic in its goals.