SOURCE: "The Great American Debate," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXII, No. 8, May 15, 1975, pp. 3-6.

In the following excerpt, Elliott discusses the debate surrounding exploration and colonization of America during the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, which is the subject of Antonello Gerbi's critical study The Dispute of the New World. He then considers the "double vision" which "proved to be of critical importance for the evolution of European attitudes to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. "

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...