OCEA^.C DISCOVERIES., 275 



Spaniards. Hernandez also availed himself of a collection of 

 medicinal plants which he found still growing in the cele- 

 brated old Mexican garden of Huaxtepec, which, owing to 

 its vicinity to a newly-established Spanish hospital,* the Coii- 

 quistadores had not laid waste. Almost at this time the fos- 

 sil mastodon bones on the elevated plateaux of Mexico, New 

 Granada, and Peru, which have since become so important 

 with respect to the theory of the successive elevation of mount- 

 ain chains, were collected and described. The designations 

 of giant bones and fields of giants ( Campos de Gigantes) suf- 

 ficiently testified the fantastic character of the early interpre- 

 tation applied to these fossils. 



One circumstance which specially contributed to the exten- 

 sion of cosmical views at this enterprising period was the im- 

 mediate contact of a numerous mass of Europeans with the 

 free and grand exotic forms of nature, on the plains and 

 mountainous regions of America, and (in consequence of the 

 voyage of Vasco de Gama) on the eastern shores of Africa 

 and Southern India. Even in the beginning of the sixteenth 

 century, a Portuguese physician, Garcia de Orta, under the 

 protection of the noble Martin Alfonso de Sousa, established, 

 on the present site of Bombay, a botanical garden, in which 

 he cultivated the medicinal plants of the neighborhood. The 

 muse of Caraoens has paid Garcia de Orta the tribute of pa- 

 triotic praise. The impulse to direct observation was now 

 every where awakened, while the cosmographical WTitings of 



reigned from 1464 to 1477. The learned native historian, Fernando 

 de Alva Jxtlilxochitl, whose manuscript chronicle of the Chichimeque 

 I saw in 1803, in the place of the Viceroy of Mexico, and of which Mr. 

 Prescott has so ably availed himself in his work {Conquest of Mexico, 

 vol. i., p. 61, 173, and 206; vol. iii., p. 112), was a descendant of the 

 poet king Nezahualcoyotl. The Aztec name of the historian, Fernando 

 de Alva, means Vanilla face. M. Ternaux Compans, in 1840, caused a 

 French translation of this manuscript to be printed in Paris. The notice 

 of the long elephants' hair collected by Cadainosto occurs in Ramusio, 

 vol. i., p. 109, and in Grynaeus, cap. 43, p. 33. 



* Clavigero, Storia antica del Messico (Cesena, 1780), t. ii.,p. 1.53. 

 There is no doubt, from the accordant testimonies of Hernau Cortez in 

 his reports to the Emperor Charles V., of Bernal Diaz, Gomam, Oviedo, 

 and Hernandez, that, at the time of the conquest of Montezuma's em- 

 pire, there were no menageries and botanic gardens in any part of 

 Europe which could be compared with those of Huaxtepec, Chapolta- 

 pec, Iztapalapan, and Tezcuco. (Prescott, op. cit., vol. i., p. 178; vol, 

 ii., p. QQ and 117-121 ; vol. iii., p. 42.) On the early attention which 

 is mentioned in the text as having been paid to the fossil bones in the 

 "fields of giants." see Garcilasn, lib. ix., cap. 9; Acosta. lib. iv., cap 

 30; and Hernandez Cod. of 1.5-56), t. i.. cap. 32. p. 105. 



