Natural Histories

chapter 1 Natural Histories

“The action of the first human being in this golden age—wrote Linnaeus in a paraphrase of the Biblical story of creation—was the inspection of the creatures and the imposition of the names of the species according to genera”.1 The naming of creatures was also very much in the mind of the eighteenth-century Jesuit historian Pedro Lozano (1697–1752). In his Chorographic Description of the Great Chaco (Madrid, 1733), while describing the animals of that land, Lozano enumerated seven species of bees: yamacuá or mongrel bee, yalamacuá or moromoro bee, aneacuá or small black bee, and so on.2 Unlike Linnaeus, whose biological systematics was indissolubly tied to Latin, Lozano classified the bees using their aboriginal names and the implicit native taxonomy.3 He took those names from the vocabulary of the tongue of the Lules written by the Jesuit Antonio Machoni (or Macioni, 1672–1753), who in 1711 founded the reduction of San Esteban de Miraflores for this people from the eastern Andean valleys. As a procurator of the province of Paraquaria in Madrid and Rome, Father Machoni published his Arte y vocabulario de la lengua Lule y Tonocoté and also saw through the press Lozano’s Chorographic Description, the earliest example of the kind of natural history written by Jesuit missionaries in Paraquaria.4

1 Linnaeus, Systema naturae, 12th ed. (Stockholm: Salvius, 1766), 1:13. 2 Pedro Lozano, Descripción corográfica del Gran Chaco Gualamba, ed. Radamés Altieri (Tucumán: Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, Instituto de Antropología, 1941), 46. Unless when a translated edition is mentioned, all translations are mine. 3 For the names of bees among the peoples of the Chaco, see Raúl N. Martínez Crovetto, Zoonimia y etnozoología de los pilagá, toba, mocoví, mataco y vilela, ed. J. Pedro Viegas Barros (Buenos Aires: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, 1995), 67–70. For the classification of bees among the Guaraní, see Arnaldo de Winkelried Bertoni, “Contribución a la biología de las avispas y abejas del Paraguay (Hymenoptera),” Anales del Museo Nacional de Historia Natural de Buenos Aires 22 (1912): 97–146. For a general account of the Lule-Tonocoté language, see Willem F. H. Adelaar and Pieter C. Muysken, The Languages of the Andes (Cambridge, Engl.: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 385–392. 4 Antonio Machoni, “Vocabulario de la lengua Tonocoté y Lule,” in idem, Arte y vocabulario de la lengua Lule y Tonocoté (Madrid: Herederos de Juan García Infanzón, 1732), 2. Eventually Machoni was named Father Provincial of Paraguay (1739–1743) and president of the University of Córdoba (1743–1747). See DHCJ, s.v. “Machoni, Antonio,” by João Baptista and C. J. McNaspy. For the Jesuit missions among the Lules, see Guillermo Furlong, Entre los lules de Tucumán: según noticias de los misioneros jesuitas Antonio Machoni, Pedro Lozano, Pedro

Félix de Azara (1742–1821) was a military engineer who arrived in the Río de la Plata as one of the experts sent by the Spanish crown to demarcate the new boundary between Spanish and Portuguese territories according to the Treaty of 1750. Unable to fulfill his commission because of the delay of the Portuguese party, during the two decades he lived in South America Azara took to the study of the geography and zoology of the region. His books on quadrupeds and birds, modeled upon Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, were the first thorough and system- atic accounts of the beasts and birds of the land.5 Azara’s most popular work, Voyages dans l’Amérique Méridionale (Paris, 1809)—to this day a major source of information about the land and peoples of Paraguay and Río de la Plata—is strongly anti-Jesuitical.6 The naturalist Charles A. Walckenaer (1771–1852), who translated the book to the French, tells in his introduction that Azara’s only commentary after reading De abiponibus, the famous ethnographic memories on the peoples of the Chaco written by the Jesuit Dobrizhoffer, had been that the padre had written just what he had heard in Buenos Aires, without ever seeing anything by himself.7 Azara’s arrogance was only matched by his lev- ity: Martin Dobrizhoffer, a Jesuit from the Habsburg empire, had lived for 18 years in the missions, first among the Guaraní and then among the Abipones.8

Juan Andreu, Pedro Artigas, José Solís, Pedro Francisco Charlevoix, José Peramas, y Francisco Barnechea (Buenos Aires: San Pablo, 1941). 5 See Barbara Beddall, “‘Un Naturalista Original’: Don Félix de Azara, 1746–1821,” Journal of the History of Biology 8, no. 1 (1975): 15–66, and the ensuing polemic in Thomas Glick and David M. Quinlan, “Félix de Azara: The Myth of the Isolated Genius in Spanish Science,” Journal of the History of Biology 8, no. 1 (1975): 67–83 and Barbara Beddall, “The Isolated Spanish Genius—Myth or Reality? Félix de Azara and the Birds of Paraguay,” Journal of the History of Biology 16, no. 2 (1983): 225–258. 6 Felix de Azara, Voyages dans l’Amérique Méridionale, trans. C. A. Walckenaer, with notes of Georges Cuvier, 4 vols. (Paris: Dentu, 1809). Vols. 3 and 4 of this work contain the French version by Charles Sonnini de Manoncourt (1751–1812) of Azara’s Apuntamientos para servir a la historia natural de los páxaros del Paraguay y Río de la Plata. Felix’s brother, José Nicolás, was a Spanish diplomat in Rome who took active part in the process of the suppression of the Society of Jesus by Clement XIV in 1773. See Isidoro Pinedo Iparraguirre and Inmaculada Fernández Arrillaga, “Estudio introductorio. 1769: los jesuitas en el banquillo,” in Manuel Luengo S. I. Diario de 1769. La llegada de los jesuitas españoles a Bolonia, ed. by idem (San Vicente del Raspeig: Universidad de Alicante, 2010), 9–72. See also the collection of letters by Azara to Manuel de Roda y Arrieta (1708–1782), Minister of Grace and Justice of Charles III of Spain and a main protagonist in the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain and its domains, in José Nicolás de Azara, El espíritu de José Nicolás de Azara descubierto en su correspondencia epistolar con Don Manuel de Roda, 3 vols. (Madrid: Imprenta de J. M. Alegría, 1846). 7 Azara, Voyages, 1:27, note. 8 See below for bibliography on Dobrizhoffer’s life.