Torrubia on the shells of the mountains (1754): an empire-wide evidence base and an arithmetical refutation
The dissertations that give Torrubia's Aparato its title argue that fossil shells found far inland and high above the sea are real marine bodies. The argument rests on a stated rule — only petrifactions seen by Spanish observers inside Spanish dominions — putting Ulloa's Chilean shell terraces, Philippine quarries, Tuxpan and Molina de Aragón on one footing. It refutes the Crusader-pilgrim hypothesis by arithmetic, and ends in theology.
Why this wins its question: The eighteenth-century fossil debate is told in English as a conversation between Buffon, Réaumur, Vallisnieri and their successors, with Spain absent and the Spanish American record entering only as raw material. This object prints, from the sheets of a Madrid 1754 imprint, a Spanish contribution to that exact conversation: an explicit evidential rule that makes the monarchy's whole territory one observational field, a quantitative refutation of Buffon's pilgrim hypothesis that needs only a volume, a rate and a population estimate, and the earliest European description this corpus has opened of the fossil shell terraces above the bay of Concepción — quarried for lime, measured in toises above sea level, and shown to hold the same three named species at the shore and on the hilltops. It refuses the two easy endings. It does not present Torrubia as a proto-geologist: the conclusion he reaches is a miraculous Deluge and the object says so and says which parts did not survive. And it does not hide the irony that the man reproaching Feijoo and Kircher for philosophising from their studies is the same man who, seventy pages earlier in the same volume, concluded there had been giants in America.
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 dissertation states its own evidential rule, and the rule is imperial in scope rather than national in the narrow sense. At page 92 Torrubia writes that he has chosen to restrict himself "por aora, à estas petrificaciones, que son constantes, y vistas por los Physicos de nuestra Nacion dentro de nuestros Dominios, para probar la no repugnancia de las que cuenta Alexandro". The localities he then names are Tanlagua, "que viò nuestro Ulloa", and Cápul, Cagayán, Tuxpan and Mochales, "que yo he visto" — Quito, the Philippines, the Gulf coast of New Spain and Aragon treated as one observational field. A monarchy is being used as a scientific instrument: the criterion is that a Spaniard saw it in a Spanish possession.
The strongest single piece of American evidence in the dissertation is quoted from another man's book and attributed on the page. Page 149 sets out, over the whole leaf and in italic as quotation, what Torrubia cites as Ulloa tom. 3 lib. 2 cap. 6 p. 324 n. 532: that in the territories around the bay of Concepción in Chile, from Talcaguano to the Concepción and as much as four or five leagues from the shore, there lies "un terrazgo de Conchas de distintas especies, y sin interposicion de tierra alguna", half a vara to three quarters thick and a foot and a half to two feet down, the smaller shells filling the cavities of the larger; that lime is made from it on the spot, "haciendo grandes huecos en la tierra para sacarlo, y calcinar"; and that the same beds are found "encima de los cerros de mediana altura en aquellas cercanias", not less than fifty toises above sea level, with lime kilns standing on those sites and further beds twenty toises higher still.
The Chilean passage is the kind of evidence that only a working colonial economy produces, and Torrubia uses it as such. The beds were known because they were being quarried: the shells were burnt for lime for building, which is why their thickness, depth and elevation had been measured at all. The same quotation names the species in local terms — "à la una Choros, la otra Pies de BURROS, y la ultima Bulgados" — and states of the elevated beds that they are "de estas mismas especies de Conchas, y no de otras, las que se sacan tanto en los llanos, como en lo alto de los cerros". Identity of species between the coastal bed and the hilltop bed is the point of the observation, and it is an argument about continuity of deposit.
Torrubia is working from the current European literature, not a century-old one, and he attributes the hypothesis he attacks with care. Page 146 opens section XXVIII on the claim made "En una Disertacion Italiana impressa en Paris el año de 1746 ... segun escribe Mr. Buffon", that the shells found petrified in Italy, France and other places of Christendom are from the Levant, brought back by the pilgrims of Syria in the time of the Crusades and left scattered where they passed; the footnote gives Buffon, Hist. Natur. tom. 1 art. 8 p. 412, and quotes the French. The hypothesis is thus the Italian dissertation's, reported by Buffon, and page 148 records that Buffon himself "ridiculiza con gran sal" such ideas — a distinction this entry keeps because Torrubia keeps it. He also cites Réaumur, Mémoires de l'Académie for 1720 p. 413, in French, at page 148, and Vallisnieri's Reflexiones sobre el Diluvio and Buffon again at p. 203 on page 179. A Madrid imprint of 1754 arguing with the first volume of the Histoire naturelle, published in 1749, is a five-year turnaround.
The refutation of the pilgrim hypothesis is arithmetical, and it is the most modern-looking move in the volume. Page 147 takes the shell bed of Touraine at the volume the French calculation gives — "ciento y treinta millones, seiscientas y ochenta mil Tuessas Cùbicas", nine square leagues of surface at not less than twenty feet deep — supposes four pilgrims loaded with shellfish to fill each cubic toise, and gets "quinientos veinte y dos millones, setecientas y veinte mil personas". He then sets that against the seventy million Riccioli allows for the whole of Europe and concludes that "quatrocientos cincuenta y dos millones, setecientas y veinte mil personas mas, que las que tiene toda Europa" would have had to be put on the road to carry shells to Touraine, and asks where they came from, where they lived, and why the memory of the Crusades preserves no such concourse. The reductio does not need a theory of deposition to work; it needs only a volume, a rate and a population.
He also attacks the hypothesis from working practice, and the comparanda are American and Asian. Page 148 observes that the Touraine falun is dug and spread to enrich the fields — "como en Lima con el Guanaco, y en España con el Estiercol", the Lima term being the seabird dung of the Peruvian coast — and that in the Philippines, on the authority of the Chronicle of the Province of San Gregorio which he cites as tom. 1 cap. 2 num. 18 pag. 8, there is "una Ostreria, y Concha, que se saca en qualquiera parte donde se cava, que por mas que se gasta, nunca se agota, siendo la materia de que se hace la cal para las fábricas de esta tierra". Peruvian seabird guano, Spanish dung and a Philippine shell quarry are put alongside a French fossil bed as instances of one natural kind, which is the comparative method the dissertation is arguing for.
Against Feijoo and against Kircher his complaint is about method, and he names it. Page 86 turns Feijoo's own words back on him — that in an hour spent philosophising in his study he found "que nuestras petrificaciones, y aùn otras mas extraordinarias, eran naturalmente posibles" — and then observes that Feijoo never went to Biedoblo in Africa or to the Laguna Kitaya between Russia and Tartaria, the two marvels he had reported, where whole households, herds, carts and tents were said to have turned to stone in a night; and that "El Padre Kircher, desde su Aposento, se inclinò à creer, que la petrificacion de Biedoblo pudo ser milagrosa". His stated position on both is that the phenomena are naturally possible and need no miracle, and that reasoning from an armchair about places one has not seen is the fault. The corpus notes the irony without softening it: this is the same author who, in the companion dissertation of the same volume, reached a false conclusion about giants.
He states, in one aside, what he thinks is at stake for Spain in the argument. Page 147, immediately after the arithmetic, offers that "Algun consuelo debemos tener los Españoles reputados por Barbaros por los Estrangeros, (de lo que muchos de los nuestros tienen gran culpa) viendo que hay entre ellos Physicos de tal calaña". The clause in parentheses is the unusual part: he concedes that much of the reputation is his countrymen's own fault. The passage is evidence about how the standing of Spanish natural philosophy was felt from inside in 1754, and it is quoted here as that rather than as a finding about the reputation itself.
The conclusion the dissertation actually reaches is theological, and the corpus says so rather than letting the good arguments stand for the whole. Pages 175 and 179 argue that the testaceous bodies of the mountains are properly marine, that the fishes were not the object of the curse and therefore did not perish — quoting Augustine, "Universa, quae in aquis vivere possunt, Diluvii plaga non tetigit" — and that the Deluge was miraculous water brought over the earth by God rather than water released from the abyss or the seas: "El Diluvio se celebrò con agua milagrosa venida de la mano de Dios, sin salir de sus senos la de los Abysmos, ni mover de su centro la de los Mares." Page 179 draws the consequence he needs, that the flood was a calm forty-day inundation which left the trees standing and deposited everything gently, "sin aquellas tormentas procelosas, ni violentos Uracanes, que quisieron fingir los Visionarios". The premise is Genesis and the mechanism is a miracle; the observations are real and the frame around them is not geology.
What survives of the argument and what does not. The pilgrim hypothesis Torrubia demolished was wrong and his demolition of it is sound on its own terms; the marine origin of the shells he defended is correct; the identity of species between coastal and elevated beds that he takes from Ulloa is a real observation, and the Chilean terraces are today read as raised beaches produced by tectonic uplift, a cause neither man had. His own explanation — a single miraculous forty-day flood — is not a scientific hypothesis and did not survive. A Spanish contribution to the fossil debate is real but partial, and this entry states the partition rather than claiming the whole.
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from pages 83 to 92 and 146 to 179 of the Madrid 1754 printing, and everything attributed to Ulloa, Buffon, Réaumur, Riccioli, Vallisnieri or the Chronicle of San Gregorio is quoted as Torrubia prints and cites it — no external copy of any of those works was consulted, so the accuracy of his quotations, page references and figures is not tested here. The plates and the Indice de Láminas were not opened. Nothing here establishes how the volume was received in Spain or abroad, whether Buffon or anyone else answered it, whether a second tome appeared, or what Torrubia himself had seen in his years in the Philippines and America beyond what these pages state. The modern reading of the Concepción terraces as tectonically raised beaches is not taken from this source.