Father Furlong’s book is the summation of a lifetime of research on colonial science in the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata (Argentina). The author understands “science” in the broad-gauged hispanic sense, encompassing not only the natural sciences, but history, geography, philosophy, law, and theology as well. In this review I will discuss only the physical and biological sciences.
The work is profusely illustrated and makes fascinating reading. But the drawbacks of its encyclopedic, mainly biographic, organization (a section on each discipline, with topical subsections in no particular order) are multiple. There is no critical apparatus except for section bibliographies. There is no index—a serious deficiency when dealing with a topic so dependent on the interchange of ideas and communication between individuals. Last, and most serious, there is no attempt at synthesis. Therefore, basic questions are not answered: When did “modern science” enter Argentina? What, particularly, was the fate of two touchstones of modern science, the Copernican heliocentric theory and the circulation of the blood? How long was Argentine science dependent on mainly Spanish sources? When did national scientists break away from Spain and turn to mainstream European scientific centers? At the eighteenth century’s end, was Argentine science still “colonial” in nature, or was there progress towards an independent scientific tradition? To none of these questions does Furlong provide a direct answer; yet, on the basis of his profuse data it is possible to venture some provisional conclusions.
Modern science arrived late in the Viceroyalty. In Spain its introduction was owing to a small group of novatores who labored during the last third of the seventeenth century to overcome the entrenched scholastic science of the universities (implacably hostile to Copernicus, but accepting Harvey’s doctrine as an emendation of Galen). Some of these novatores, such as the Cartesian philosopher and mathematican Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz (misspelled throughout this book) and Hugo de Omerique, a mathematician highly regarded by Newton, were read in Argentina. But Caramuel seems to have been read not contemporaneously, but a century after he wrote, and the more important Copemican novatores are not visible in Argentina. The prime exposition of Copemican astronomy by an Argentinian comes very late: Melchor Fernández, writing at the end of the eighteenth century, accepted it “as a hypothesis.” Furlong does not mention Harvey or the circulation of the blood at all. The conclusion would be that the most polemical aspects of modern science were avoided until they had largely lost their sting.
The eighteenth-century picture is brighter than the one preceding, thanks to the Jesuit university at Córdoba. Here taught the Englishman Thomas Falkner, a direct disciple of Newton’s, and from this primary locus the entire Newtonian corpus was diffused among Argentinian savants, apparently without opposition. The works of the main Newtonian synthesizers, such as Pieter van Musschenbroek (also misspelled throughout) were widely read.
In spite of the readership gained by enlightened Spaniards such as Benito Feijóo, Argentinian scientists had moved away from dependence on Spain by the mid-eighteenth century, drawing inspiration chiefly from England in physics and France in biology. This dependence of colonial scientists on Europe was typical, as was their difficulty in obtaining scientific instruments, most of which were imported from Britain. By the end of the century, however, there was a definite scientific nexus inside the country which, in turn, formed part of a broader circle of scientific communication within Latin America. Therefore, a figure such as Félix de Azara, previously thought to have been an “isolated genius,” is revealed to have been in contact with local scientific correspondents and informants with interests similar to his own. Argentina, like other Latin American centers such as Peru, New Granada, and Mexico, finished the century in a phase of transition between colonial dependence on European science and the establishment of a distinctively national scientific school, the development of which, here as elsewhere, was aborted by the convulsions of independence.
