Jose Antonio Alzate and the Gacetas de Literatura de Mexico (from 1788)
A scientific journal written almost single-handed by a creole priest in Mexico City from 1788, whose title page claims corresponding membership of the Paris Academy of Sciences and two Spanish bodies. It printed a test for alum adulterated into spirits, the origin of the Mexica argued from ruins on the Gila with their latitudes, a case against Linnaean nomenclature made on pharmacological grounds, and the Academy of Lyon asking whether America should have been discovered at all.
Why this wins its question: In English Alzate is at best a name in a list of creole savants, and the Gacetas de Literatura are described rather than quoted; where colonial Mexican science is mentioned at all it is as reception of European ideas. This object argues from the sheets of a tome opened page by page: the article in which a Mexican naturalist tells the memory of Linnaeus that his system has harmed the real knowledge of plants, and proves it with parsley and hemlock; a chemical test for the alum being mixed into spirits in New Spain, published because the adulteration was reaching drinkers; the origin of the Mexica argued from the ruins on the Gila and near Janos with their latitudes; the lac ant engraved in his own plate and an argument that Madrid was buying from the Dutch what its own vassals could supply. Beside them, given equal weight: the letter in his own pages saying the kingdom was perishing of hunger, the Botanical Garden director's reply to a quarrel Alzate was party to, the Academy of Lyon asking whether America should have been discovered at all, and the fact that every biographical claim usually made about him traces to an 1831 reprinter who cites nothing.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The volume used here is the first tome of the Puebla reprint, whose title page reads "GACETAS DE LITERATURA DE MEXICO: POR D. JOSE ANTONIO ALZATE RAMIREZ, SOCIO CORRESPONDIENTE DE LA REAL ACADEMIA DE LAS CIENCIAS DE PARIS, DEL REAL JARDIN BOTANICO DE MADRID, Y DE LA SOCIEDAD BASCONGADA", carries the motto "Aurum alios capiat, merces mihi gratia vestra", and gives the imprint "PUEBLA. Reimpresas en la oficina del hospital de S. Pedro, a cargo del ciudadano Manuel Buen Abad. 1831." An engraved portrait faces it, lettered "D. JOSE ANTONIO ALZATE". The word "Reimpresas" on the title page is why nothing here is quoted as the wording of 1788 rather than of 1831.
Alzate's own prologue states the want the paper was meant to fill and counts the earlier failures. In so great an abundance of periodical literature, he asks, is it not strange that the metropolis of the New World - "en el que se hallan raros talentos, particulares producciones de los tres reinos" - should show a gap that the name of Mexico might fill with lustre. He records that about 1768 a work of the kind was begun, but that its author, whether for want of materials or for other reasons, "nos dejo el edificio en los cimientos", and that about 1771 two periodicals were circulating which suffered the same complaint.
The article headed BOTANICA is the most substantive thing an American naturalist of that decade could say against the reigning European system, and it is an argument from use rather than from patriotism. "Perdoneme la memoria del celebre Linneo", Alzate writes, "y digo que sus profundos conocimientos, mas han perjudicado al verdadero conocimiento de las plantas, que nos han hecho felices." What is the good of having formed a new language, he asks - the sentence is set as a question in the print - "si por el no adquirimos los conocimientos relativos a las virtudes de las plantas, que es lo que nos importa"; and what is the good of reducing this or that plant to such a genus and species if it holds virtues quite opposite to those the appearances of its assigned class imply.
He argues it with a case that can kill, which is the point of the objection. "En Europa se esperimentan infelices resultas a causa de que el Perejil, y la Cicuta, son semejantes respecto a su organizacion" - parsley and hemlock sit close together in a system built on the organs of fructification, and a classification that puts them close teaches nothing about what they will do to a patient. The position lost: binomial nomenclature became the language of botany everywhere, this object makes no claim that Alzate was right, and the objection is recorded here as what a working American naturalist thought the system cost.
The chemistry in the same tome is applied public health. Alzate sets out a method for detecting alum mixed into spirits, states that his principal aim in the piece "tan solamente ha sido manifestar lo pernicioso que es el Alumbre respecto a la salud, y la facilidad con que lo mezclan en los licores espirituosos en Nueva Espana", reports having found it by dissolution of salt of tartar in wines sold in taverns, and gives both an analytical and a synthetic test - a few drops of alkali in pure liquor show nothing, but in liquor already mixed with drops of alkali one or two drops of dissolved alum bring down the earth that served the alum as its base.
Immediately after it, under the heading PROBLEMA, he prints the question that European opinion was then asking about his half of the world. "La Academia de Leon de Francia, ha ofrecido un premio al que resolviere este dificil problema. El descubrimiento de la America ha sido util, o pernicioso a los hombres? Si ha sido ventajoso, se solicitan los medios de conservar, y de aumentar la utilidad; por el contrario, si pernicioso los arbitrios conducentes para remediar los males." An American editor putting that competition in front of his own readers, without an answer attached, is the plainest evidence in the tome of what he thought a periodical was for.
The article "Del origen de los indios megicanos" argues a migration from physical remains and fixes them by coordinates. Some historians hold that the nations came from the north, from the neighbourhood of the lake of Tehuallo, to settle in what is now New Spain; the tradition the northern nations keep serves as support, Alzate writes, and so do "las antiguedades que aun permanecen", which are the sites known as casa grande on the banks of the river Gila and the casas grandes near the presidio of Janos. His footnotes give the lake at 41 degrees of latitude and 265 and a half of longitude, the casa grande at 34 and a half and 259 and a half, and the casas grandes at 31 and a half; and he notes that the inhabitants of the northwest of New Spain say these three sites are the ones where the Mexicans halted.
Natural history in the tome is written to a commercial argument, and the argument is against the metropolis. Describing the lac gathered in New Spain and the ant that makes it, Alzate reckons from a correspondent's report of two loads of thirty arrobas coming from near Tehuantepec to Oaxaca how much more the coasts of the Gulf and the South Sea could yield, and states that much of it is lost every year for want of merchants who know the trade. The sealing wax, he writes, "se fabrica en Madrid por cuenta de la real hacienda, comprando el material a los astutos holandeses", and asks whether all that the Dutch carry away might not be turned instead to the benefit of Spanish vassals using the material of their own country. He notes that the figure of the lac-making ant was engraved in the plate accompanying his gaceta number 12 of 1788.
That the paper had opponents, and that they were institutional, is on its own pages. The tome prints a reply from the director of the Royal Botanical Garden of Mexico to a letter written against the author of the gacetas, which recalls that in another time "nos daban sus Mercurios volantes, y Diario Literario", denies malice, professes to have praised Alzate many times since the institute was founded, and then sets the terms of the quarrel: apologias in favour of botany may certainly be written, but the contest should stay within the controverted matters themselves, never touching the man, "ni por el mas oculto resorte de reflecsion, en las cualidades personales". It is signed "El Director del Jardin Botanico" and dated "Gaceta de Literatura. Megico 12 de julio de 1788".
The cost of the society the gacetas were written in is printed in them, in a correspondent's letter on the ruin of American agriculture. The decay seen in farming and in stock-raising, its author writes, does not come from the land, the lands being many and excellent, but "de la suma pobreza de todos los labradores, y criadores, del abandono en que se hallan sus particulares privilegios, y de no tener recurso en el tiempo de sus necesidades campestres"; this is the sole cause of a poor and ruined countryside "y todo este reino pereciendo de hambre, por falta de pan y carne, al mas ligero movimiento contrario del cielo, como hemos esperimentado muchos anos". The remedy he proposes is an agricultural society. The voice is a correspondent's, addressed to Alzate, not Alzate's own.
The claims most often repeated about Alzate come from the 1831 editor rather than from Alzate, and they are carried here at that weaker standing. The reprinter's prologue states that the Academy of Sciences of Paris, after associating him to its body, read and printed his papers with praise more than once; that it commended the judicious observation he made with other astronomers when the transit of Venus across the solar disc was presented to the world in 1769; and that it had engraved at its own expense the map of North America he dedicated to its members, with the Basque Society and the Botanical Garden of Madrid following. No document is cited for any of it. The title page of 1831 does carry the three corresponding memberships.
The same editor states what he decided not to leave out, and why, which is a useful thing to have on the record about a reprint. Some of the matter, he writes, seems not to be for these days, naming the treatise on the form of government and the impugnaciones; he did not omit them, having consulted some learned men who decided for printing, on the ground that when all an author's works are offered nothing should be omitted, since the public would believe that as these were excluded many others had been suppressed. He also gives his own frame for the reprint, a Mexican republican one - that a cultivated nation will pity the lot of "nuestros antepasados, por el ningun conocimiento que tenian de sus derechos y libertad".
What these sources are and are not is worth stating. The tome is a reprint set at Puebla in 1831, thirty-two years after Alzate's death, so it is evidence of what a Mexican press of 1831 published as Alzate's texts and not of the 1788 sheets, which were not reachable here; several of the pieces in it are letters from correspondents rather than his own writing, and the editor's prologue is an interested nineteenth-century notice, not a document. Nothing here establishes how many copies of the gacetas were printed or read, whether the Paris Academy did what the editor says it did, or that any of the proposals in the tome was acted on. The evidence tier of this object follows the editor's prologue, the weakest source it cites.