BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN NATURAL HISTORY 
ern hemisphere. <A real service to science, 
as well as to the study of history and geo- 
graphy, has been rendered by Dr. E. L. 
Stevenson, in his facsimile reprints of six- 
teenth and seventeenth century world 
maps published under the auspices of the 
Hispanic Society of America. 
It will suffice to mention at this point 
the names of several authors who treated 
more or less extensively the natural 
history of the New World during the lat- 
ter half of the sixteenth century. The 
figures and descriptions of South Ameri- 
can animals given by André Thevet in 
his Singu- 
laritéz de 
la France 
Antarctique 
(1558), and 
by Jean de 
Lery, in 
his Voyage 
en ~—— Brazil 
(1578), were 
freely made 
use of in a 
number of 
later 
pilations, 
one such be- 
ing the His- 
toria Na- 
ture (1635) 
of Juan E. Nieremberg, a Jesuit pro- 
fessor at Madrid. Another was a His- 
tory of the Indies, in Latin, published at 
Florence in 1588 by the Jesuit Father 
Giovanni Maffei, who had access to the 
archives in Lisbon. Many interesting 
notices are to be found in La Historia 
del Mondo Nuovo (1565), by the Italian 
traveler Girolamo Benzoni; also in the 
com- 
toucan, Rhamphastus. 
collection of voyages and travels pub- 
lished by Ramusio in 1556 and 1565, 
and in the “ Observations”’ (1593) of the 
famous English freebooter, Sir Richard 
Hawkins. The following extract on the 
Barring the feet, which are crow-like, not a bad idea of a Brazilian 
(From Thevet’s ‘‘Singularitez,’’ 1558] 
300 
chinchilla may serve as a specimen of 
Sir Richard’s natural history notes: 
Amongst others [the Chileans] they have 
little beastes like unto a squirrell, but that he 
is gray; his skin is the most delicate soft and 
curious furre that I have seene, and of much 
estimation (as is of reason) in the Peru; few 
of them come into Spaine because it is diffi- 
cult to be come by; for that the princes and 
nobles laie waite for them. They call this 
beast chinchilla, and of them they have great 
abundance. 
More important from a scientific 
standpoint and more trustworthy than 
any of the minor writers just men- 
tioned are 
the works 
of the two 
Spanish 
chroniclers 
José de A- 
costa and 
Antonio de 
Herrera, 
who wrote 
toward the 
end of the 
sixteenth 
and begin- 
ning of the 
seventeenth 
century re- 
spectively. 
The Jesuit 
historian de Acosta (1590) would seem 
to have been the first writer to notice 
the chinchilla, and he refers particularly, 
as do also Cieza de Leon and Garcilasso 
de la Vega, to the bones of fossil mam- 
mals found in the Campo de los Gigantes 
(Savanna of Bogota). Similar remains 
were also noted in Mexico by Francisco 
Hernandez, whose Historie Animalium 
(1628) remained for a long time in 
manuscript before being finally edited 
and published. 
[Article to be concluded in December Journal] 
