Caldas's barometric-botanical levellings: a plan to give every plant an altitude (Quito, 1801)
In a memoir addressed to Mutis and printed among the unpublished pieces of the 1849 Paris edition of the Semanario, Francisco José de Caldas proposed cutting the vegetated part of the earth into twelve zones one barometric inch wide and assigning each plant its zones, so that a flora would say not "habita en Quito" but "á tantas toesas de elevacion sobre el mar". The same letter calls the Indians of Yaruquí lazy barbarians. Both are quoted here.
Why this wins its question: Plant geography in the Andes is told in English as Humboldt's, with Caldas reduced to a local informant or omitted. The proposal itself is rarely quoted. This object quotes it from the page — the barometer at 16 inches at the snowline and 28 at the sea, the twelve zones one inch wide, "habita en la zona primera", the botanical map whose landmarks are cacao and quina instead of villages, the field rule "toda planta que se presente, se describe y se esqueleta" — together with Caldas's own acknowledgement that Humboldt had already built levellings of the terrain, the editor's inferred date on which every priority argument rests, and the passage on the same pages in which Caldas calls the Indians of Yaruquí lazy barbarians.
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 text and its provenance. Page 546 of the 1849 Paris volume prints the heading "MEMORIA Sobre el plan de un viaje proyectado de Quito á la América setentrional, presentada al célebre director de la Expedicion botánica de la Nueva Granada D. José Celestino Mutis, por F. J. de Caldas", with the editor's footnote "Se infiere aunque carece de fecha que esta memoria fué escrita en 1801, en Quito." It is therefore an undated manuscript printed forty-eight years later by a partisan editor, and the date is his inference, not the document's. Everything below is worded as what this volume prints.
The proposal itself is on page 556 and it is an instrument, not a metaphor. Observing that "el barómetro se sostiene en el límite de la nieve á 16 pulgadas, en el mar á 28 ó cerca: la diferencia son 12 pulgadas", Caldas asks whether it would not be new and at the same time beautiful to divide "en 12 zonas, de una pulgada en el barómetro de ancho cada una, toda la parte de la tierra que es capaz de vegetar", and to assign each plant its limits, saying laconically and exactly "habita en la zona primera, habita desde la tercera hasta la quinta". He states the rule for plants that span several zones — enter the lowest and the highest, and the intermediate ones are implied — and notes that the zones will not be equal in width, the upper ones rising gradually.
He calls the thing by its name and claims it. The same page reads "Yo he proyectado unas nivelaciones barométrico-botánicas semejantes á las que el Sr. baron de Humboldt ha construido con solo el objeto de dar idea de las diversas alturas del terreno", and closes "Esta idea me toca, la creo nueva y digna de ensayarse." The distinction he draws is between a levelling made to show relief and a levelling made to place organisms; the priority he asserts is over the second use, and he asserts it while naming Humboldt as already in possession of the first.
The priority question is contested and this volume is not a neutral judge of it. The editor's footnote on page 557 states "Recuérdese que cuando Caldas escribia esto aun no conocia el cuadro de la Geografía de las plantas que poco despues envió desde Guayaquil á Bogotá al Sr. Mutis el baron de Humboldt", which is an argument for Caldas's independence made by an editor whose stated purpose is to recover a national hero, resting on a date the same editor inferred. The safe statement is narrower than the one the volume invites: Caldas set out a barometric zonation of vegetation in a memoir to Mutis, and by his own account he did so knowing of Humboldt's levellings but not of a plant geography built on them.
The programme is practical and states its own working rule. Page 557 makes the point of the exercise plain — "las plantas serán unos barómetros que en todas partes y en todos los lugares nos indiquen la elevacion en que vivimos; y el agricultor, con una nivelacion en la mano, verá el lugar y la zona que ocupa su terreno, verá las plantas que en esta prosperan" — lists four great levellings to be compared (Chimborazo to Guayaquil, Sonzonate to Mexico and the rest), and gives the field rule in italics: "Toda planta que se presente, se describe y se esqueleta; si por nuestros libros parece nueva, se diseña." The first consignment from Quito is to cover all plants growing between 16 and 20 inches of barometer.
A second idea in the same memoir is cartographic. Page 553 proposes putting at the head of the Flora de Bogotá "una carta botánica del reino, que así quiero llamar una carta en que, suprimiendo tanto pueblo oscuro, tantos arroyos de ninguna consideracion, se sustituyeren en su lugar las plantas útiles á las artes, al comercio, á la salud" — a map whose named features are the homelands of cacao, tea, nutmeg and quina rather than settlements. On the same page he criticises Humboldt's geographical work for mixing the certain with the doubtful, "diseña al lado de un retazo digno de d'Anville, otro por simples relaciones de gentes ignorantes", and records that he had shown the baron none of his own materials except the map of Timaná.
The same letter carries what a defensive account would leave out. Writing on page 548 of the destroyed pyramids that marked the Yaruquí baseline of the French geodesic mission, Caldas argues that the foundations may survive because the Indians who pulled the monuments down would not have troubled to dig: "estos Indios cuyo carácter es la pereza fueron los ejecutores del atentado ... Es bien difícil persuadirse que estos bárbaros sobre quienes nada han influido 300 años de civilizacion, que para dar un golpe en sus labores necesitan de la presencia de un sobrestante, se hayan querido tomar voluntariamente el trabajo de desenterrar muchos quintales de piedra." The creole savant who wanted every American plant given an exact altitude wrote of the people of the same valleys in these terms, in the same document.
The motive he gives for the whole journey is national repair. Page 547 asks whether it is not worthy of Mutis "reparar de este modo el honor de la nacion vulnerada, no quiero decir si con justicia, por los pueblos extranjeros", and page 548 closes the passage on the pyramids with "Qué consuelo para España poder reparar sus antiguos yerros de un modo tan honroso" and "La posteridad es justa: ella vengará las injurias hechas á las ciencias." The plan is offered as science and as an answer to foreign contempt at once, and it is honest to record that the two motives are not separated in the text.
What this object cannot show. The journey was never made and the memoir is a plan: nothing here establishes that the twelve-zone notation was ever applied to a flora, that the four levellings were carried out, or that any botanist outside New Granada saw the proposal before 1849. The volume is a reprint, so the wording is as its editor set it, and no manuscript is described or reproduced in the pages opened.