Until the 18th century it was very difficult to accurately map the Iberian Peninsula, and errors were common when mapping the vast territories of the Spanish monarchy on the other side of the Atlantic. An enormous scientific effort was necessary to rigorously delimit the main geographical points and to document the enormous biodiversity of the American southern cone, both in flora and fauna.
One of the protagonists of the advance of this knowledge was Félix de Azara y Perera, whom Francisco de Goya immortalized in 1805. His date of birth, according to various authors, varies between 1742 and 1746. He came into the world in Barbuñales, a small Aragonese town , in the bosom of a wealthy family, and entered the University of Huesca at a very young age, where he studied Philosophy, Art and Law.
In 1763 he entered the Infantry Regiment as a cadet, where he studied mathematics at one of the most renowned schools of the time, that of Pedro Lucuce, a prestigious professor of military engineers. Four years later he was appointed second lieutenant of the Infantry and drafting engineer of the national armies, plazas and borders.
With a solid and modern scientific preparation, he carried out various engineering works, such as the hydrological correction of the Oñar, Henares and Tajuña rivers and the fortification of the squares of Figueres and Mallorca. He also participated in the Algiers expedition in 1775, where he was shot and left for dead on the battlefield. Thanks to the care of a friend and the courage of a sailor, he was able to save his life.
In 1781, already with the position of lieutenant colonel of Engineers, he received the order to move to the viceroyalty of Río de la Plata. His task would consist, together with the Portuguese delegation, in carrying out the demarcations of the territories for the elaboration of maps of the region and setting the limits of the border between the domains of Spain and Portugal in that area of the world.
With this company it was intended to ratify the Treaty of San Ildefonso, signed by both nations in 1777, with the purpose of putting an end to the disagreements between the two crowns.
Despite the fact that the estimated time to carry out the expedition was about four months, Azara remained in the American continent for two decades. The Portuguese representation, which was in no hurry to define a border that significantly reduced its territory, took more than ten years to arrive. Given the monumental delay of the Portuguese side, the Spanish naturalist found himself in need of looking for additional occupations. During that time he carried out the first major geographical study, of flora and fauna, and of the economic resources and communications of Paraguay.
In the works of Félix de Azara, developed according to the empirical method, knowledge about nature, astronomy, cartography, zoology or botany is brought together.
In addition to being abundant, his scientific legacy is unusually rigorous for the 18th century. When in his descriptions he did not have the animal in front of him, he indicated it for the record. This honesty and scientific rigor were not at all common among ornithologists of his time, which, by the way, drove him crazy.
It was during those years when Azara began to put together a new theory, which was opposed to that of the renowned French botanist and naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc, Count of Buffon. While Leclerc and other naturalists considered that the evolution of the species was a process of loss of the original characteristics and, therefore, a degenerative change, Azara maintained that in nature a work of natural selection and struggle for life takes place. , resulting in successive internal evolutionary adaptations that modify the species.
That hypothesis, with which he challenged the deterministic ideas of the time, was destined to open a new window to scientific knowledge. In fact, his work placed him among the best naturalists of his time. Despite the admiration he professed for Buffon, Azara attributed his mistakes, among other things, to the fact that he received the embalmed species after long voyages across the Atlantic, which deteriorated his physical characteristics. He, on the other hand, had direct contact with the fauna and flora of the place.
In his Apuntamientos para la historia natural de los Quadrúpedos del Paraguay y Río de la Plata (1802), he wrote: “It seems that Buffon is of the opinion that the climates alter everything, and that that of America diminishes the magnitude of the beasts, being unable to produce them the size they are elsewhere. But in my opinion he is wrong in everything; Well, in the Author's Ornithology I have found many birds that in America have the same shapes, magnitude, colors and their distribution as in the rest of the world”.
Azara's main criticisms of Buffon's work focused on what the Frenchman called “causes of variability”, in reference to climatic and trophic factors, etc. As time would show, agreeing with Azara, variability processes present random causes, not always caused by environmental conditions, as Buffon argued.
Despite the fact that the Spaniard erred in certain aspects of his biological hypotheses about the origin of the diversity of organisms, there is no doubt that his observations and interpretations had a notable influence on the scientific thought of the time.
Charles Darwin himself, who always carried a copy of Azara's Travels through South America (1809), quoted him in The Origin of Species and, above all, in Travels of a Naturalist Around the World, collected his data from observation and evaluated their hypotheses.
Decades later, Darwin himself, after direct observations in nature, agreed with the Aragonese in his views on evolution and corrected the preceding ideas.
Azara, lacking specific preparation in many fields, did not have a theoretical corpus on which to base a theory capable of explaining the evolutionary system, but he approached the concept of heredity formulated by science in the 19th century. For his part, Darwin raised scientifically, based on a solid theoretical foundation, what Azara's examples already demonstrated.
The Aragonese was not only interested in zoological and botanical knowledge. He also wrote about other disciplines that, at that time, did not even constitute a body of knowledge, such as anthropology, studying the uses and customs of some indigenous peoples, or ethology, describing the behavior of numerous animals.
Although it is true that, in general, he had to face his work alone, during his stay in Paraguay he had the help and advice of the nature scholar Blas de Noceda, who was a priest in the old Jesuit mission of San Ignacio Guazú. from 1784 to 1800 and who maintained a small domestic zoo.
Without previous knowledge or bibliography to consult, Azara managed to describe more than 448 species of birds, as well as a large number of quadrupeds. So titanic was his task that he ran out of words with which to name them, for which he was forced to resort to localisms from his homeland, giving rise to a curious transfer of terms from one side to the other. of the ocean. For example, to this day, the terms esparvero (a small raptor) or garrafón (a kind of verdecillo) are still used in Argentina and Uruguay, which are part of the ornithological heritage of Aragon.
In 1801 he returned to Spain and, shortly after, traveled to Paris to see his brother José Nicolás de Azara, then ambassador to Napoleon. There he received homage from the scientists of the Natural History Museum, and his fame spread throughout Europe.
After being promoted to brigadier of the Navy in 1802, he requested retirement and rejected the post of viceroy of Mexico offered to him by Manuel Godoy, Prime Minister of Carlos IV. But in 1805 he agreed to be a member of the Junta de Fortificación y Defensa de Indias, at which time he was portrayed by Francisco de Goya.
A man of liberal convictions, he supported the Zaragoza soldier José Rebolledo de Palafox and subsidized the resistance to the French invader during the War of Independence. In 1808, after the abdication of Carlos IV in Fernando VII, and in disagreement with Fernandino's absolutism, Félix de Azara retired to Barbuñales, where he studied agriculture for the Royal Aragonese Economic Society.
He was elected alderman of Huesca and died of pneumonia in his hometown on October 20, 1821, being buried in the Lastanosa pantheon in the Huesca cathedral.
The National Museum of Natural History of Montevideo, in a volume paying homage to the Spanish polymath published in 1997, states: "For the countries of the former Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, the figure of Azara, in the scientific field, has an odd importance among the personalities that mark the course of said century. There is no exaggeration in this, since the action of this illustrious Aragonese was carried out in so many fields of knowledge in which he opened furrows, that he has left posterity a debt that is difficult to settle ”.
