Beginnings of Natural History in America. 367 



Man}' other Spaniards published their observations upon America in 

 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it is perhaps not necessary 

 to refer to them even by name. They were, as a rule, travelers, not 

 explorers. Purchas a.ssures us that ' ' Acosta and Oviedo have best 

 deserved of the studious of Nature — that is, of the knowledge of God in 

 his workes. ' ' 



III. 



A personage who must on no account be overlooked in the consid- 

 eration of these early days is Garcilasso de la Vega. Born in Peru in 

 1539, his father the Spanish governor of Cuzco, his mother a princess of 

 the Inca blood, he boasted of a lineage traced through the line of ancient 

 Peruvian raonarchs back to Manco Capac and the Sun. He served as a 

 .soldier in Europe and died in Spain about the year 161 7. His Royal 

 Commentaries of Peru, constitutes a magnificent contribution to the 

 history of pre-Columbian America, and was said by some authorities to 

 have been first written in the Peruvian language.' 



Be this as it may, De la Vega's commentaries, though more valuable 

 to the civil than to the natural historian, will always possess a peculiar 

 interest, not only because the author was the first native of America who 

 wrote concerning its animals and plants, but for the reason that it repre- 

 sents to us the historic and scientific lore of the aboriginal inhabitants of 

 this continent. 



De la Vega describes in an intelligible manner the condor (^Cuntiu-) of 

 South America, of which, as he tells us, there was a famous Indian paint- 

 ing in the temple at Cacha, the mountain cats or ocelots (Inca Ozcollo, 

 Aztec Ocelotl), the puma, the viscacha, the tapir, and the three- toed 

 ostrich. He was one of the first to notice the skunk (^Mephitis, sp. ), 

 "which the Indians call Annas, the Spanish Zorinnas." "It is well," 

 he remarks, ' ' that these creatures are not in great numbers, for if they 

 were, they were able to poison and stench up a whole countrey. " He 

 devotes a chapter to "the tame cattel which God hath given to the 

 Indians of Peru" — the llama and the huanaco — and .speaks also of the 

 paco and the vicuna, clearly di.stinguishing and describing the appear- 

 ance and habits of the four species of Tylopoda which occur on the west 

 coast of South America, although European naturalists a century later 

 knew but two of them. He describes the annual vicuna hunts which 

 were conducted by the Inca kings in person, assisted by twenty or thirty 

 thousand Indians. 



The fauna of Peru, as catalogued by him, included nearly fifty species, 



'A Paris edition of 1633 had the following title : Commentaire Royal oi: I'Histoire 

 des Yncas Roys de Peru, etc. Ensemble une description particuliere des Animaux, 

 des Fruits, des Mineraux, des Plantes, etc. Ecrite en langue Peruvienne et traduit 

 fur la version Espagnole par I. Baudouin, Paris, 1633; Amsterdam, 1704 and 1715. 

 See Artedi, Bibliotheca Ichthyologica, 1788, p. 65. 



