Torrubia on the American bones (1754): a wrong conclusion reached by a working method
The first Spanish printed treatise on fossils argues, from teeth found in the Campos de Toluca, that a race of giants once lived in America. The conclusion is false. The reasoning is not: comparative anatomy against Sloane's figured elephant teeth, distance from the sea as an objection to a marine origin, Nahuatl lexicography as evidence of what the country held, and a field visit to a Spanish cave that Torrubia printed as a failure.
Why this wins its question: The standard telling makes eighteenth-century Spanish natural history a blank between Feijoo and the Bourbon expeditions, and makes American fossil bones a story that begins with Buffon, Jefferson and Cuvier. This object prints, from the sheets, a 1754 Madrid volume that is already in that argument thirty years before Cuvier is born, and reproduces the actual moves: a specimen with a stated provenance, a comparison against a named plate in a named journal issue, a locality objection — a hundred leagues from the sea — to a marine origin, and a demand that a European naturalist have American field knowledge before generalising about American bones. It also prints two things such stories almost never carry: a published negative result, where the author went to the cave expecting giants and printed the ordinary bones his own man brought up, and a lexical method that takes Nahuatl vocabulary as evidence about the natural world. And it states the ending honestly — the conclusion is false, Sloane was substantially right — with the denigration of "sencillos Indios" quoted from the same pages as the praise of their calendar, so the reader can weigh the method without being sold the result.
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 book is the Aparato para la historia natural española, tomo primero, printed at Madrid in 1754 in the shop of the heirs of Agustin de Gordejuela y Sierra, by Fray Joseph Torrubia, who signs himself Archivero y Chronista General of the whole Order of St Francis. Its title page advertises the volume as dissertations on the Deluge and on the transmigration and petrifaction of marine bodies found on the highest mountains of Spain. The pages read here are not that argument but the dissertation on giants that runs through the fifties, sixties and seventies of the pagination.
Torrubia's American evidence is a tooth he handled. At page 78 he records that the Bachiller Don Manuel Romo de Vera, a priest of Mexico City descended from the conquerors of New Spain, gave him a molar "de uno de estos descomunales cuerpos Americanos, tan grande como dos buenos puños", which he says he left behind in Mexico in the house of Don Bartholomè de la Torre. The specimen therefore reached him through a criollo collector, and the book states where it came from and where it stayed.
He argues against Hans Sloane's identification of such bones as elephant, and the argument is anatomical and geographical rather than scriptural. At page 78 he states that the Mexican molar is not like the five figures of elephant teeth in Sloane's dissertation of 10 December 1727 in the Histoire de l'Academie Royale des Sciences, and answers the suggestion that it might be the tooth of a Cetus dentatus by locality: "La mia se hallò mas de cien leguas distante del Mar", and it is for the other side to say how or why such beasts should have gone to sow only their teeth, in such abundance, in the Campos de Toluca.
At page 69 he turns Sloane's own criterion against him: the Englishman concludes the bones are elephant because where the teeth were found the tusks were found too, and Torrubia answers that no ivory tusk has ever been found in New Spain. He then quotes Feijoo — tomo 7, discurso 2, num. 47 — for the proposition that neither the universal Deluge nor any inundation could have carried elephant bones from the southern parts to the regions of the north, and asks how the same author can rest on Sloane for the American case. The page closes with the charge that Sloane lacked "la instruccion, que pudo conseguir, gyrando el Nuevo Mundo": a European naturalist writing about American bones without American field knowledge.
The most unusual move in the dissertation is lexical, and Torrubia states it as a rule of evidence. At page 69, against the elephant, "Entre los Indios no tienen nombre proprio, que es un fuerte argumento": the absence of a native word is treated as evidence that the country did not hold the animal. At page 63 the same rule runs the other way — Nahuatl has the proper noun Quinametin, "que quiere decir Gigantes", and he asks who could have travelled ahead of the Spaniards to sell the Indians a false name for a kind of creature they never saw. The corpus notes that the inference is only as good as the premise, and that a name can be a story as easily as a specimen.
His control for the lexical argument is a printed dictionary of everyday speech, not a chronicle. Page 63 works through Pedro de Arenas's Vocabulario manual de las lenguas castellana y mexicana, printed at Mexico in 1686, setting the loanwords against the native words: they had no plates and so say Zoqui Platos, no apples and so say Mantzanex, no garlic and so say Castilan ajox; but they had charcoal and called it Tecolli, quail and called them Zulin, doves and called them Huilolt, and knew the sky and called it Ilhuicatl. Absence and presence of loanwords are used as a test of what the country held before contact.
He treats indigenous historical reckoning as testimony rather than fable. Page 61 sets out the fifty-two-year solar cycle, formed "con mas primor que los Egypcios, y Caldèos" out of four thirteen-year periods, and the four epochs — Atonatiuh from the Creation to the time the sun ended in water, Tlachitonatiuh from the Deluge to the destruction of the giants and the earthquakes, Ecatonatiuh to the great hurricane, Tletonatiuh to an end in fire. He adds that the second-to-third transition is "pintada en sus antiquisimos Mapas debaxo del Geroglyfico de Ce Tecpatl". Page 63 makes the argument explicit: when they seriously divided their periods "ni hacian Eneidas, ni componian Yliadas. Ello es, que ni mienten, ni fingen."
The same pages carry the denigration and the corpus prints it with the argument. The peoples whose calendar he has just praised are "Gentiles Americanos", "Indios Gentiles" and "sencillos Indios"; and Torrubia, having quoted Feijoo's warning that "yà no es nuevo engañar al Pueblo, o engañarse el Pueblo sobre cosas de Gigantes", answers not by denying the deception but by locating it: "este engaño en el Americano tiene profundissimas, y muy solidas raizes". The defence of the reliability of indigenous record and the assumption of indigenous credulity are two sentences apart.
The Acosta passage he leans on is quoted in full and in capitals at page 57, with the reference "Acosta Historia de Indias, lib. 7. cap. 3. pag. 457": the Tlaxcaltec tradition of destroying the giants, and Acosta's own report that at Mexico in the year eighty-six a giant was found buried on a Jesuit estate called Jesus del Monte and a molar brought to be shown him "tan grande como un puño de un hombre", which he says he saw and marvelled at. Torrubia's conclusion from it is stated openly as a confession rather than a demonstration: "confessarèmos abiertamente, que huvo especie de Gigantes en la America".
The best evidence that Torrubia was doing something other than collecting confirmations is that he printed a disconfirmation on his own ground. Pages 77 and 78 record his visit, on Easter Sunday 22 April, to the cave discovered by a goatherd in the mountains of Nuestra Señora de la Hoz, which was said to hold whole skeletons of giants. He went, he says, "vacilante en la fé, que debia darse à la proclamada especie"; he names the four men present including himself; his amanuensis, Hermano Pasqual de Mendoza, a native of the Philippines, went down into the pit. What came up was an ordinary shin bone, a jaw with four small teeth, and an ilium proving its owner "apenas tuvo cinco pies de alto". His verdict on the Spanish giants is flat: "Assi se desfiguraron los Gigantes de la Hoz. Estos son los que finge el vulgo, y populacho."
The conclusion is nevertheless wrong, and the corpus says so plainly rather than leaving it to be inferred. The descomunales teeth of the Campos de Toluca are proboscidean, not human; ivory of American proboscideans has since been found; and Sloane's identification, which Torrubia thought he had defeated, was substantially right. The failure is instructive rather than embarrassing: the same page that dismisses the Spanish giants as a fiction of the vulgar keeps the American ones, because a specimen he had handled did not match the figures he had to compare it with. A method good enough to kill his home case was not good enough to kill his American one.
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from pages 57, 61, 63, 69, 77 and 78 and from the title page of the Madrid printing of 1754. The dissertations on marine fossils and on the Deluge that give the volume its title were not opened and nothing is attributed to them; the index of plates was not opened; the second tome was not looked for. Nothing here establishes how the book was received, whether Feijoo or anyone in New Spain answered it, where the Toluca molar or the Hoz bones now are, or what Torrubia had seen during his own years in America and the Philippines beyond what these pages say. The identification of the Toluca teeth as proboscidean is the settled modern reading and is not taken from this source.