Colegas clérigos del joven Darwin

Abstract

In the last third of the Eighteenth century and the first one of the Nineteenth, the studies of Botany and Natural History in the Rio de la Plata region were developed mainly by clergymen. A generation of priests, educated in the last decades of the Bourbon era, undertook the task of investigating nature as part of their pastoral ministry. This article explains the historical conditions which nourished such orientation and those which ended it in the mid-Nineteenth century. By studying a wide variety of sources -royal orders, correspondence, inventories of libraries, periodical press-, we have been able to give the reader an insight into the kinds of motivations and conceptions that guided the scientific work of Darwin’s fellow colleagues among the clergy.