The exchanges between Thomas Jefferson and the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc come to mind. Leclerc, informed probably more by prejudice against the English Colonies than actual observations (he never went to America), had famously argued that the supposedly colder climate of North America created weaker, smaller organisms and people. Jefferson, a lifelong Virginian and amateur scientist, rebuffed his claims with many examples of the grandeur of North American wildlife, culminating in a series of scholarly arguments and in 1787 the shipment of a Moose carcass to Leclerc's home in Paris.