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169 chapter 7 The Irreducible Difference of America t he influence of Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias was felt on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, Acosta’s book was quickly translated into all the major languages and became one of the most authoritative studies on the nature and cultures of the New World. During the eighteenth century, when other early colonial texts were being strongly criticized for what Enlightenment scholars perceived as their utter unreliability, Acosta’s Historia still retained some of its authority.1 However, this does not mean his work was universally acclaimed. Particularly in America, dissatisfaction with Acosta’s theories and methods motivated subsequent natural history, at least in part. Almost a half-century after Acosta, Bernabé Cobo carefully considered Acosta’s theories and line of reasoning, only to find them wanting. As we saw in Chapter 4, Cobo declared that he undertook the task of writing a new account of the nature and history of America motivated by what he considered to be the lack of accuracy and methodological soundness of all previous books devoted to the subject . His long American experience, enriched by the opportunities presented to him by his constant movement among different Jesuit colleges and residences in Peru and Mexico, led him to question the theories advanced by previous authors to explain American natural phenomena. As he remarked to his readers, living in America for almost fifty-seven years had allowed him to directly study the flora, fauna, and climate of the continent (Obras, 1:4). According to Cobo, this put him in an advantageous position in regards to the natural philosophers who contented themselves with mere speculation on American natural objects, no matter how diligently they did so. Cobo never mentioned Acosta directly, but one of his main targets in the Historia del Nuevo Mundo was precisely the speculative nature of many of Acosta’s answers to the problems posed by the New World. To be sure, Acosta did claim that his own experience was at the base of his reflections on America, but the fact is that he wrote two-thirds of his Historia natural y moral while in Spain and not in America, as he candidly informed his readers. Cobo, on the other hand, proudly announced he had composed his book 170 Missionary Scientists piecemeal, writing about each region while residing in it “to better corroborate what I was writing, as someone who had the object in front of him [can do]” (Obras, 1:7). Although apparently circumstantial, this difference between the places of composition is suggestive of a divergent conception of America and its relationship to the Old World. As we saw in the previous chapter, for Acosta, even though America could give the impression of contradicting the philosophical doctrines of the ancients at first, on closer scrutiny its particularities could be explained following the same methods and premises used to study the Old World. In this sense, direct experience, although it did not hurt, was not necessary to speculate philosophically about its phenomena. Acosta may have laughed at Aristotle and his meteorology when crossing the Torrid Zone, but besides supplying the basic data, that crossing had very little bearing on his own explanation of America’s temperate climate. The same could be said of Acosta’s discussion of the causes of the astonishing mineral riches of the continent, or of his explanation of the animal and human occupation of the continent following the Universal Flood. For him, his years in America were more a source of authority and legitimacy as a writer than a source of firsthand information about its nature.2 This is evident, for instance, in his cursory treatment of American plants. Besides some praises of the almost infinite variety of vegetal species in America and their usefulness to human life, Acosta bluntly declared that he would not dwell on the subject for long because he did not remember all the plants he saw, nor had he seen them all. And even if he had, he thought it would be“tiresome” to describe all of them. Instead, the reader would have to content herself or himself with a “superficial and summary” description of a rather reduced number of plants. If the reader was still curious after this, there were excellent guides available for him or her to consult, such as Nicolás Monardes’s Historia medicinal or Francisco Hernández’s study of Mexican flora.3 In Acosta’s view...

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