The petrified crabs of Hainan and Luzon: a transpacific specimen trade described in 1754
Section XIII of Torrubia's Aparato traces fossil crabs gathered by measure on the beaches of Aparri and Buguey in Cagayán, sent by the Dominicans to the apothecaries of Manila, carried to Madrid by a Jesuit for the Botica of the Colegio Imperial, sold in Cádiz as a remedy for the stone, and told apart from Hainan specimens by composition. A documented supply chain for scientific material, with the credulity and the commerce on the page.
Why this wins its question: Histories of eighteenth-century natural history collecting are written around the Royal Society, the Paris Académie and the great cabinets, and the Spanish Pacific appears in them, if at all, as a source of curiosities with no route and no names. This object prints the route and the names from the sheets of a 1754 Madrid imprint: who gathered the fossils and by what measure, which order administered the province they came from, which apothecaries received them in Manila, who carried them across the Pacific and the Atlantic, which pharmacy in Madrid they ended in, who sold and vouched for them in Cádiz, and what they were claimed to cure and what they were claimed to beat. It adds the comparison that made the collection scientific — Hainan specimens distinguished from Cagayán ones by ferruginous particles — and it keeps three things a triumphal version would drop: the specimens were relics and merchandise as well as evidence, the therapeutic claim is a testimonial that does not survive, and the naturalist who argued elsewhere in the same volume that petrifactions need no miracle declined here to take the miracle away from the people of Hainan, calling their belief a blind cult and leaving it standing in the same breath.
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 section is headed for the Spanish specimens and opens on one Torrubia says he collected himself. Page 83 begins section XIII, "PIEDRAS DE CANGREJO ESPAÑOLAS", with the occasion: "el medio Cangrejo petrificado, que hallè en los Terminos de Pardos, en el Sitio del Hoyo Torrecillo sobre mano derecha, distante del Lugar como un tiro de bala, y dos leguas de Molina de Aragón", which he says is exactly represented at num. 4 of Lámina 3. A find spot given to the musket shot, a distance to the nearest town and a plate number is the form of a locality record, and it is what makes the rest of the section comparable material rather than anecdote.
The Asian material enters through a named chain of printed authorities and named religious. Page 83 reports the "Piedras Indianas del Cangrejo" from Curvo Semedo's Memorias de Varios Simples, quoting his account that the sea mud of the island of Hainan, "vecina à Macao en el Imperio de la China", has such a quality that a crab which enters it "se convierte totalmente en una dura piedra, reuniendose todas sus partes como si fuesse una cosa labrada, ò engastada por la misma naturaleza", and that this happens in a short space while the creature is still immobile, a phenomenon seen at low water. Torrubia adds that the mud has the same virtues as the crab, "pero no en toda la Playa de Hainàn se petrifican estos Cangrejos, sino en aquella parte donde viviò el Santo Apostol San Francisco Xavier".
The Philippine supply is described as organised, routine and quantified by measure. Page 84 records that petrified crabs are so abundant on the beaches of Aparri and Buguey, in the province of Cagayán or Nueva Segovia on Luzon — "Isla Capital de las Philipinas" — "que se cogen por medida mayor, comunicandonos à las Boticas de Manila con gran charidad los Padres Reverendos de Santo Domingo, à cuya zelosa administracion està encomendada, desde la Conquista, la copiosa Christiandad de aquella Provincia". Fossils gathered in bulk by a mission and forwarded to the apothecaries' shops of the colonial capital is a distribution system, not a curiosity cabinet, and the chronicle describes it as one.
The last leg of the chain is named with its carrier and its destination. The same page says that "El Padre Pedro Murillo Velarde de la Compañia de Jesus, mi Paysano, hombre de muy distinguido caracter, y literatura, quando llegò de aquellas Islas, me proveyò de algunos para alivio de los afligidos, y necessitados, y puso otros muchos en la Botica del Colegio Imperial de esta Corte". A Jesuit returning from Manila brings the specimens to Madrid, gives some to a Franciscan for the relief of the sick and deposits the rest in an institutional pharmacy in the capital. The route Philippines to Madrid, and the two uses the material was put to at the end of it, are stated in one sentence by a man who received some of it.
The specimens were compared, and the comparison is by composition rather than by shape. Page 84 states that those who have seen the Philippine crabs observe in them "su solidissima petrificacion, sin desfigurarse en nada el Cangrejo", and that "Estos se diversifican de los de Hainàn, en que los de aquella Isla abundan en particulas ferruginosas, las que no se advierten en los de Aparri, y Buguey". Two populations of fossils from different seas distinguished by the presence or absence of iron particles is a mineralogical criterion applied to a biological object, and it is the kind of discrimination that only a collection assembled from several sources makes possible.
The material was medicine, and the page records who vouched for it and against what competitor. Page 92 says the virtue experienced in these crabs is "de ser notorios absorventes, y de ser saxifragos": placed whole in the water that is drunk, the sufferer from the stone "siente el efecto de la disolucion, que confirman las arenas, que diariamente se expelen". Torrubia says he has experienced the benefit himself and that men of entire good faith publish the same in Cádiz, naming "Don Santiago de Yrissarri, y Don Juan Joseph Arambide, que la han usado con felicidad, y las guardan con aprecio", and that Curvo brings others in his Memorial "que exceden à las de las Bezuales". A fossil traded across the Pacific and sold as a lithontriptic superior to the bezoar stone belongs to the history of the drug trade as much as to the history of collecting.
The specimens were also being venerated, and Torrubia's handling of that is the most revealing thing in the section. Page 83 notes that some make Curvo Semedo out to be a man of easy belief, and answers: "Yo con ingenuidad religiosa debo dexar las virtudes de los Cangrejos de Hainàn en el estado en que las hallè, y vì celebrar por aquellas Regiones. Allà las hacen por milagrosas." Page 84 goes on that the people of Hainan "con notable piedad creen ... que sus Cangrejos petrificados son milagrosos en veneracion, y obsequio del Glorioso Taumaturgo", and asks "Pues què motivo havrà para despojarlos de este ciego culto?" He calls the belief a blind cult in the same sentence in which he declines to attack it. He neither endorses the miracle nor debunks it, and the corpus reads that as a position taken rather than as an oversight, because the companion section of the same volume argues at length that petrifactions are naturally possible and need no miracle at all.
The Philippine material is not only geological. Page 147 records, of the same coasts, that "En Philipinas baxan las Monas de los Montes al Mar à hacer sus pesquerias": they wait for the low tides, walk the beaches, find the caves where crabs are, put in their tails, and the inhabitant seizes the insult with its claw, "haciendo en el Mono tenàz presa"; the monkey then jumps and pulls out the enraged crab and carries it to the hill as food for its young. Page 148 says that when the crab is vigorous — "que los hay enormes, como uno que tengo petrificado" — it holds its enemy fast by the tail until the rising sea drowns the pirate, and cites La Loubère's Voyage de Siam as agreeing closely, for the monkeys of the Cape of Good Hope that go down to the sea for shells and carry them up the mountain to eat, leaving their leavings there. Torrubia's use of it is satirical and is aimed at the pilgrim hypothesis: many shells lie so far out of the way that pilgrims could not have carried them there, so "por què no se podria decir con mayor verisimilitud, que las conduxeron alli las Monas?" He adds that such notions are famous and that Buffon ridicules them "con gran sal", which places Torrubia and Buffon on the same side of that particular question.
The American link in the section is one clause, and it is worth isolating because it is the only place on these pages where New Spain appears. Page 92 lists, among the petrifactions "vistas por los Physicos de nuestra Nacion dentro de nuestros Dominios", "las propias de Càpul, de Cagayàn, de Tuxpan, y de Mochales, que yo he visto", alongside "las mismas de Tanlagua, que viò nuestro Ulloa", and states that the crabs and pieces he keeps are figured at Lámina 13, nums. 1 to 4, as "perentorio documento". Tuxpan on the Gulf coast of New Spain and Tanlagua near Quito are placed on the same list as two Philippine localities and one Spanish one. This entry reports the list as Torrubia gives it and makes no claim about what was actually found at any of those places beyond his assertion that he saw it.
What the section shows and what it does not. It documents a real chain — mission collectors in Cagayán, apothecaries in Manila, a named Jesuit carrier, an institutional pharmacy in Madrid, retail attestation in Cádiz — and a real comparative practice, specimens from four seas set side by side and distinguished by composition. It does not show a scientific institution: the chain runs on personal acquaintance and religious-order charity, the specimens are valued simultaneously as evidence, as medicine and as relics, and the therapeutic claim is a testimonial one that no page here tests. Crab stones are calcium carbonate and dissolving them in drinking water will not clear a kidney stone; the reported sand in the urine is not evidence that it did.
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from pages 83, 84, 92, 147 and 148 of the Madrid 1754 printing. Everything attributed to Curvo Semedo, Feijoo, La Loubère or Murillo Velarde is quoted as Torrubia prints and cites it; no copy of any of those works was consulted, and the accuracy of his quotations and references is not tested here. The plates themselves — Lámina 3 num. 4 and Lámina 13 nums. 1 to 4 — were not opened, so nothing here describes what the figures show. Nothing establishes how many specimens moved, over what period, at what price, whether the Botica of the Colegio Imperial kept them, what became of Torrubia's own collection, or whether the identification of the Hainan and Cagayán fossils as crabs would stand today. The chemical statement in the preceding claim is the ordinary modern reading and is not taken from this source.