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FRANK KERMODE
phrenology; for these were all of great general interest at the time, and
were by many intelligent people regarded as sciences. The fact that
they have since been stripped of this distinction is not to the point.
However, the present point is not Hawthorne's interest in this
moment of medical science, but the probability that he was far from
indifferent to the new senses given to the concept of types by the au–
thority of Agassiz, which had come to complicate the older typologies.
The proof is to be found in
The House of the Seven Gables.
We have
seen that the names of the characters - Pyncheon, Maule, Holgrave -
all allude to aspects of that complicated word. A similarly oblique hint
at another is provided by the Pyncheon hens.
These degenerate birds are ordinarily treated as a sort of arch
decorative parallel to the Pyncheons, similarly declined; and indeed
they are that so; but there is so much about the hens in the novel that to
limit their function thus is to call Hawthorne immoderate, tedious and
obvious. What seems to have happened is this: when all Boston was
discussing Agassiz and the fixity of types, Hawthorne remembered and
returned to what had formerly been the
locus classicus
of such discus–
sions among educated men, namely the
Natural History
of Buffon.
Years before he had borrowed the fourth volume of the translation of
the Salem Library and so acquainted himself with views that were of
special interest to Americans.
Buffon believed the types to be invariant - an elephant was
always an elephant, and never turned into anything else - but al–
lowed that within the type changes might be wrought by time. These
changes were degenerative; thus an animal that was removed from its
native habitat, or domesticated, would grow smaller. In particular he
believed, and argued in his fourth volume, that this degeneration oc–
curred in European species when they were transplanted to the New
World.
Some of the celebrity, or notoriety, of these opinions was doubt–
less owing to jefferson 's careful refutation of them in his
Notes on
Virginia.
Obviously Buffon's inversion of the familiar terms of the
translatio
was totally unacceptable
to
Jefferson, especially since man
was included among the species that degenerated in the West. What
about the mammoths? To forestall the damaging reply that there cer–
tainly
had
been mammoths, but that they existed no longer, Jefferson
insists on the vastness of the continent, and the certainty that there are
mammoths around somewhere, the species having been created in-
