Science
In 1737 Jorge Juan y Santacilia and Antonio de Ulloa, Spanish scientists sent by the French Academy on a scientific mission to measure a degree of meridian arc at the equator, arrived in the colony. They also had the mission of reporting on disorganization and corruption in the government and smuggling. Their report was published later, under the title Noticias Secretas de América (Secret News From America).
Manuel de Guirior assisted the scientific expedition of Hipólito Ruiz López, José Antonio Pavón and Joseph Dombey, sent to study the flora of the viceroyalty. The expedition lasted from 1777 to 1788. Their findings were later published as La flora peruana y chilena (The Flora of Peru and Chile). Again a major concern was stimulating the economy, which Guirior did by adopting liberal measures in agriculture, mining, commerce and industry.
Another French influence on science in the colony was Louis Godin, another member of the meridian expedition. He was appointed cosmógrafo mayor by Viceroy Mendoza. The duties of cosmógrafo mayor included publishing almanacs and sailing instructions. Another French scientist in Peru at this time was Charles Marie de La Condamine.
The Balmis Expedition arrived in Lima on May 23, 1806. At the same time these viceroys adopted rigorous measures to suppress the thought of the Encyclopedists and revolutionaries in the United States and France.
Read more about this topic: Viceroyalty Of Peru
Famous quotes containing the word science:
“What is done for science must also be done for art: accepting undesirable side effects for the sake of the main goal, and moreover diminishing their importance by making this main goal more magnificent. For one should reform forward, not backward: social illnesses, revolutions, are evolutions inhibited by a conserving stupidity.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)
“Already nature is serving all those uses which science slowly derives on a much higher and grander scale to him that will be served by her. When the sunshine falls on the path of the poet, he enjoys all those pure benefits and pleasures which the arts slowly and partially realize from age to age. The winds which fan his cheek waft him the sum of that profit and happiness which their lagging inventions supply.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Thinking is seeing.... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)