Antonio de Ulloa, Noticias americanas (Madrid, 1772)

The book a Spanish naval officer wrote after two decades in the Americas: a comparison of the territories, climates and productions of both hemispheres, a treatise on fossil shells found petrified in the Andean heights, an argument for Andean civility read off ruins and tools, and a flat rejection of the climatic explanation of human skin colour - printed in 1772, and carrying, on the page after that rejection, a racial typology of its own.