Flora Peruviana, et Chilensis (Madrid, 1798) and the royal expedition behind it
The first tome of the flora of Peru and Chile, printed at Madrid in 1798. Its preface states the rule the work was written to: with every species, the soil where it grows wild, the month it was seen in flower, the vernacular name its inhabitants use, and its medical virtues - the last learned, the authors say, from the mouths of the Indians as well as from professors of medicine. The same preface records eight hundred drawings lost in a shipwreck.
Why this wins its question: In English the Peruvian expedition of 1777 to 1788 is usually a clause about Spain collecting plants, and the Flora Peruviana is a citation in a botanical synonymy - a book whose title is quoted far more often than its text. This object argues from the sheets of the Madrid 1798 tome: the preface's own rule that every species carries the soil it grows in, the month it flowers, the name the inhabitants use for it and the medical and economic virtues it holds; the sentence putting the mouth of the Indians first among the sources of those virtues; the index of vernacular names promised as an apparatus; and the entries themselves, where Achira, Sumac-Achira, Pozuzo, Pillao and Amancaes are printed on the same lines as the Linnaean binomials. Beside them, on the same footing and from the same preface: eight hundred drawings lost in a shipwreck and more in a fire, the reliance on ministers for the money to print, and the decision to publish it all in Latin alone.
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, whose title page reads "FLORA PERUVIANA, ET CHILENSIS, SIVE DESCRIPTIONES, ET ICONES PLANTARUM PERUVIANARUM, ET CHILENSIUM, SECUNDUM SYSTEMA LINNAEANUM DIGESTAE, CUM CHARACTERIBUS PLURIUM GENERUM EVULGATORUM REFORMATIS. AUCTORIBUS HIPPOLYTO RUIZ, ET JOSEPHO PAVON, REG. ACAD. MEDIC. MATRIT. SOCIIS. TOMUS I." The imprint below it is "SUPERIORUM PERMISSU. TYPIS GABRIELIS DE SANCHA. ANNO M. DCC. XCVIII."
The Praefatio opens on the publishing history and on who rescued it. The issue of the species volumes, it says, had been interrupted since 1794, the year the Prodromus came out; in 1797 the business was carried through "studio praesertim et iteratis D. D. Antonii Porcel officiis", so that Eugenio de Llaguno, minister of justice, enjoined the authors by royal decree to publish the remaining volumes of the Flora continuously. The care of assisting the execution of that decree was committed to Zenon Alonso, and Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, named as Llaguno's successor in the supreme ministry of the affairs of the Indies, is described as adding fresh stimulus out of his love for the sciences, of which he is patron and equitable judge. A botanical folio of this size existed at the pleasure of ministers, and its authors say so on its first page.
Page II records what the crown opened to the authors while they worked, which is the material side of the same dependence. To determine the plants and to bring to light the descriptions of specimens already made by other authors, they write, it was permitted them, the king so ordering, to consult the books and plants of the Royal Botanical Garden and to have at hand even the botanical works kept in the library of the innermost ministry of the Indies. Casimiro Gomez Ortega, the garden's first professor and formerly their own teacher, is thanked for lending his collection liberally, and Antonio Jose Cavanilles is named among the writers they do not lack. What was not supplied they bought: whatever works were for sale at Madrid, and others they arranged to have sent from foreign parts, were paid for "communi Expeditionis pecunia" - out of the expedition's common purse.
The same page states the scale of the material behind it, and revises the estimate upward. In the Prodromus the authors had put the species descriptions at two thousand four hundred and the drawings at one thousand eight hundred; here they conjecture that the descriptions exceed three thousand and the drawings two thousand. Nothing on the page says how many of either had by then been engraved, and this object makes no claim about how much of the work eventually reached print.
The expedition did not end when the Spaniards sailed home, and the preface names the men who continued it. Juan Tafalla, "modo jam Academiae Limensis Botanices Professor" - by then already professor of botany at the academy of Lima - and his painter Francisco Pulgar send material daily from Peru, having been left there by the authors on the king's order to detect new plants, to repair the loss of plants suffered in the wreck of the ship Alcantara and the fire at Macora, and to answer the doubts that would arise while the work was being published. A footnote adds that Tafalla took on Juan Manzanilla for the journeys and the remaining botanical observations and put Jose Rivera in the painter Pulgar's place, and that all of them were about to undertake an expedition at the king's expense into the most fertile regions of Guayaquil.
The losses are printed in the preface rather than left to a later historian. Page IV records the loss of more than eight hundred figures suffered in the ship Alcantara, which the alumni of the Peruvian expedition had not yet had the occasion to replace, and says that the authors made it good from dried specimens in their own collections, from others, and from those "quae Cl. Dombeius redux in Hispania reliquit" - which the illustrious Dombey left behind in Spain on his return. It adds, in the authors' favour and against them at once, that the autograph descriptions were in their hands and the figures had been drawn from living plants by Jose Brunete, Isidro Galvez and Francisco Pulgar in Peru, so that plants restored from dried specimens could not be as accurate.
The preface names its predecessors and states the claim to novelty narrowly. The only botanists who had investigated the various plants of the Peruvian and Chilean coasts, it says, were Joseph Jussieu, Louis Feuillee and the Jesuit Juan Ignacio Molina; "sed illorum nemo Andium fertilissimos et spatiosissimos montes pervasit, in quibus nos maximum plantarum nostri Operis numerum decerpsimus" - none of them traversed the most fertile and most extensive mountains of the Andes, where the authors gathered the greatest number of the plants of their work. The same page credits Mutis in New Granada with an almost incredible collection of drawings and descriptions, and Martin Sesse and Jose Mociño with the Mexican expedition.
The rule the descriptions were written to is stated on page IV and is the reason this book is more than a species list. To each description, the authors write, they appended the region and the soil where each species grows of itself, the time at which they observed it in flower, "nomen vernaculum ab incolis usitatum" - the vernacular name in use among the inhabitants - the powers, medical as well as economic, with which it is endowed, and various observations on its aberrations. By all of which, they say, they may hope to have reached the double aim of botany, namely the distinction of species and the knowledge of the uses and utilities that men may derive from them.
Page V says where the knowledge of those uses came from, and the order of the list is worth reading exactly. The indication of the uses and powers, the authors write, is of those "quas ex Indorum, Medicae artis professorum, aliorumque peritorum et curiosorum hominum ore, aut nostris observationibus, et quibus interfuerimus, experimentis didicimus" - which we learned from the mouth of the Indians, of professors of the medical art, and of other skilled and inquisitive men, or from our own observations and from experiments at which we were present. Indigenous informants stand first in a sentence printed in Madrid in 1798 under royal licence.
The apparatus promised at the end of the preface follows from that rule. Besides a botanical index of genera and species, the authors undertake to add "nominum vernaculorum Elenchum" - a list of the vernacular names - of those plants that carry a name imposed either by the Indians or by the Spaniards, and after it a catalogue of the authors they used to compare and determine the plants. The indigenous nomenclature was to be indexed as a finding aid, not merely mentioned in passing.
The cost of the enterprise, in its own terms, is the last sentence of the preface. Lest the number of the volumes of the work grow too large, the authors write, they judged it fair to publish it in Latin speech alone, "quamvis Prodromum edentibus utraque lingua prodere, ut in ipso Prodromo fecimus, animus erat" - although when publishing the Prodromus it had been their intention to bring it out in both languages, as they did in the Prodromus itself. A body of plant knowledge gathered in Quechua-speaking country and from the mouths of its inhabitants was issued in a language that neither those informants nor most Spaniards could read.
The contents of this first volume are stated on the same page: descriptions of two hundred and seventy-seven species and one hundred and six plates carrying two hundred and nineteen figures of plants belonging to the first four Linnaean classes, engraved on copper by various engravers, most of them from autograph paintings made in Peru by Brunete, Galvez and Pulgar. Page V adds that the authors' own painter, Isidro Galvez, presided with them over the labours of the plate engravers. Confidence is held here at the level of the Roman numerals as they were read off the scan.
The text itself keeps the rule the preface set, which can be checked on any opening. The very first species of Classis I, Canna paniculata, is given as growing in the gardens and woods of Peru at the village of Chinchao, flowering from May to August, and called "Achira cimarrona"; Canna indica is cultivated in Peru, flowers nearly the whole year, is named "Achira", and carries the note "Usus. Peruviani plantae radices diversimode conditas edunt" - the Peruvians eat the roots of the plant preserved in various ways. Canna iridiflora grows at the village of Pillao and is called "Sumac-Achira", which the entry glosses as the beautiful Achira.
The habitats are recorded as places rather than as regions, which is what makes the volume usable two centuries later. Calceolaria virgata is placed in the circuit of Canta; Pinguicula involuta in the cold wet heights of Pillao and Panao Huanuchassci, among mosses, flowering in October, November and December; Utricularia aphylla in the flooded and damp ground of Surco and of Lima; Callisia repens and the new genus Anthodon in the woods of the Andes near the village of Pozuzo; Calyxhymenia expansa on the dry hills of Chancay and of Lima at Amancaes. The entry for Anthodon states in an observation that the authors named the genus from the toothed and ciliate leaflets of its calyx and petals, and that it is akin to Hippocratea of Jacquin and Tonsella of Schreber.
What this source is and is not should be said at the end. It is a printed folio opened here page by page: strong evidence of what was composed, licensed and printed at Madrid in 1798, of the method its authors declared, and of the losses and the language decision they recorded against themselves. It is not evidence that any particular identification is correct, that the vernacular names were rendered accurately, or that the Indians named in the preface were paid, named individually or credited anywhere in the text - none of which these pages state. Nothing here concerns the long quarrel between Ruiz and Dombey beyond the one clause the preface gives it, and nothing here fixes how many volumes of the work eventually appeared.