Francisco Javier Clavijero, Disertaciones on the land, the animals and the inhabitants of Mexico (1780)

Nine dissertations printed with a Mexican Jesuit's history of his country, written in exile to answer Cornelius de Pauw's thesis that in America nature had degenerated entirely - in the elements, the plants, the animals and the men. Clavijero sets a witness standard against a philosopher who never crossed the Atlantic, declares he has no Indian ancestry before choosing to plead the Indian case, and is himself a polemicist. Read here in the 1826 Spanish translation.