This book is the first in a series of collected articles, gathered by theme, from Historia Mexicana. The 12 pieces published here date from 1952 to 1981. Their prime topics, as might be expected, are mining (four articles) and various aspects of Mexican science or the Mexican approach to science under the influence of the Enlightenment (five). Exceptions are a discussion by Jacques Heers of dyestuffs in New Spain and North Africa, which is more economic history than science or technology; a commentary on certain themes of Juan de Cárdenas’ Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias (1591) by Emilio Uranga; and an account by Trabulse himself of the work of the Mercedarian friar Diego Rodriguez, the first holder of the chair of mathematics and astrology, created in 1637, at the University of Mexico.
All these essays contain points of interest. It is fascinating to find, for instance, Juan Mariano Mociño, a Mexican-born and -trained botanist and physician, treating yellow fever at Ecija in Andalucía in 1804, then arguing successfully before the Spanish Academy of Medicine that the cause of such epidemic disease was above all social; namely, hunger and filth. Juan Carlos Divito here presents a nice reversal of the usually assumed direction of the flow of knowledge between the Old and New worlds.
Generally, however, the collection’s level is uneven, both within individual articles and between them. The two strongest, in content and sustained discussion, are both Trabulse’s own contributions. He shows that Diego Rodríguez (another Mexican native) was a remarkably adept mathematician and astronomer, familiar with and also teaching the theories of Copernicus and Kepler, compiling logarithmic tables of trigonometric functions, and determining the longitude of the Valley of Mexico with greater accuracy than Humboldt was later to manage (though Humboldt, having misreported Rodríguez’ result, then patronizingly criticized his imprecision). Trabulse’s second offering discusses proposed improvements of the amalgamation technique in late eighteenth-century New Spain, situates them in the context of chemical knowledge at the time, and suggests why Mexican miners did not adopt them. It is an expert piece.
Collections of this sort are almost inevitably grab bags. This one is a convenient assemblage for those particularly interested in colonial Mexican science and technology. More general readers will fare better with synthetic works such as Ramón Sánchez Flores’ Historia de la tecnología y la invención en México (1980).
