Volume 22, Number 8 · May 15, 1975
The Great American Debate
By J.H. Elliott
The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750-1900
by Antonello Gerbi, translated by Jeremy Moyle
University of Pittsburgh Press, 700 pp., $19.95
American Genesis: Captain John Smith and the Founding of Virginia
by Alden Vaughan
Little, Brown, 207 pp., $6.95
Bartolomé de Las Casas in History
edited by Juan Friede, edited by Benjamin Keen
Northern Illinois University Press, 632 pp., $20.00
All Mankind Is One
by Lewis Hanke
Northern Illinois University Press, 205 pp., $15.00
In Defense of the Indians
by Bartolomé de Las Casas, translated, edited, and annotated by Stafford Poole C.M.
Northern Illinois University Press, 385 pp., $25.00
Anyone who is bothered by the marked absence of elephants from the woods and forests of America has only to turn to the pages of that great eighteenth-century naturalist, Buffon, to find the reason for this sad lacuna. Nature in America is less active, less varied, and less vigorous than in Europe because America is a new continent. Therefore the best it can manage in the line of pachyderms is the modest tapir. With time, perhaps, things may change—not that the tapir can ever hope to grow into an elephant, but at least those European breeds which, like the sheep and goat, have made the transatlantic crossing will no longer actually decrease in size in their new environment.
Review, 3130 words
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