ABSTRACT
Alan Bewell is Professor he states that "even as the primary scientific focus of biogeography was on the natural or artificial distribution of plants and animals and their adaptation to new environments. Buffon portrays the American environment as a stunted world that fails to fulfill what Annette Kolodny terms "America's oldest and most cherished fantasy. Cooper's description of the second "kind" of American plains environment, however, the "Great Prairies" stretching west of the Mississippi, takes on a different tone. While the environment of Cooper's novel is not devoid of water, it is a scarce resource that scrawls thin veins of lushness across the land. It is important to remember that like Buffon, Cooper had never actually visited the Great Plains. In particular, Buffon portrayed America's climate, water resources, vegetation, and apparent newness as a continent as the causes of degeneracy: In the New Continent, there are more running waters, in proportion to the extent of territory.
