ABSTRACT
In 1781, Spanish army engineer turned naturalist Félix de Azara (1742–1821) embarked on a state-sponsored mission to survey the new territory of Paraguay. During twenty long years there, Azara amassed a vast natural history collection. In 1788, he sent 84 specimens of 61 species of birds to the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid, along with forty pages of inventories listing the birds’ descriptive, hybrid Guaraní and Spanish names. These handwritten catalogs are the only material that remains of Azara’s birds today. Often, this not entirely scientific nomenclature was the only known name for a species, and so naturalists adopted it into official scientific taxonomy, where it has remained authoritative ever since. This chapter compares Azara’s unique nomenclature against databases of modern species names to measure the influence of this amateur naturalist and his local informants on modern Linnaean taxonomy and natural history.
