Vicente Cervantes

Vicente Cervantes Mendo (* 1758 in Ledrada , Salamanca Province , † July 28, 1829 in Mexico City ) was a Spanish botanist . Its botanical author abbreviation is “ Cerv. "

Live and act

For a long time the town of Zafra in Extremadura was considered the birthplace and 1755 as the year of birth of Vicente Cervantes, but there was no evidence of this. A few years ago, a note about his birth was found in the parish register of the municipality of San Miguel Arcángel in Ledrada. Vicente Cervantes' mother came from Ledrada, where his father worked as a doctor. It is believed that Cervantes grew up in Ledrada, and his siblings were baptized there as well.

Vicente Cervantes studied in Madrid. During his studies he did internships in one of the court pharmacies and in the Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid . After graduating in pharmacy, he worked as a pharmacist at the Madrid Hospital General.

In 1785 the doctor Martín Sessé y Lacasta (1751–1808) , who came from Aragon , began preparing a scientific expedition to New Spain (Mexico). It should explore the nature of the country, but also give the scientific teaching in this viceroyalty new impulses and bring the knowledge of the doctors and pharmacists there up to date. Casimiro Gómez Ortega (1741-1818), botany professor and head of the Real Jardín Botánico , played a key role in the selection of the expedition participants. The first American botany chair was to be established in Mexico City, and Vicente Cervantes was chosen to fill it.

Sessé was appointed head of the company officially called Real Expedición Botánica a la Nueva España (Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain). Other participants were the anatomist and surgeon José Longinos Martínez and the pharmacists Jaime Senseve and Juan del Castillo . Two young Mexican painters and graduates of the Academia de San Carlos , Vicente de la Cerda and Atanasio Echevarría , accompanied the expedition and helped document the results. Starting from Mexico City, campaigns were carried out that brought dried plants, animal preparations, panels, drawings and minerals. In Mexico City, they were examined and classified.

Cervantes traveled to Mexico at the end of 1787, where he and Sessé immediately began looking for a suitable location for the planned botanical garden. After a short period of preparation, the Jardín Botánico de la Ciudad de México was inaugurated on May 1, 1788, and Sessé was the director of the garden. The next day, Cervantes gave his inaugural lecture on the different classification systems in the history of botany and the advantages of the Linnaeus system. Three days later he started giving regular botany classes. Some of his students later became important botanists themselves, such as José Mariano Mociño , who joined the expedition in 1789.

The scientists native to Mexico were at times reserved about the Royal Botanical Expedition, as it brought new and reformist ideas into the country. Among other things, it was supposed to make known the binary nomenclature developed by Carl von Linné in Mexico. This led to a heated argument between Cervantes and José Alzate (1737–1799), a Mexican botanist who was reluctant to introduce binary nomenclature. Cervantes tried to spread new ideas, for example by translating Lavoisier's “Traité élémentaire de chimie” into Spanish. The rivalry between Alzate and Cervantes was settled in 1790, after which a fruitful collaboration developed.

Vicente Cervantes remained in Mexico after the return of the other expedition members in 1803 as a professor and director of the Botanical Garden. In addition to his teaching activities, he was engaged in research. He was also entrusted with the management of the pharmacy of the Hospital General de San Andrés from 1791 to 1809 , and later he opened his own pharmacy on Calle del Relox. He campaigned unsuccessfully for pharmacy to be taught at universities in New Spain.

In addition to about 300 first descriptions of newly discovered plants, Cervantes published 15 larger works. The “Ensayo a la Materia Médica Vegetal de México” and his contributions to “Plantae Novae Hispaniae” and “Flora Mexicana”, which summarized the results of the expedition, deserve special mention.

After the independence of Mexico, proclaimed by Agustín de Itúrbide on September 28, 1821, many Spaniards who did not want to recognize this independence were expelled by decree. This decree was not applied to Vicente Cervantes in recognition of his scientific work. He stayed in Mexico until his death in 1829.

Honors

The genus Cervantesia from the sandalwood family was named after Vicente Cervantes by Ruiz and Pavón .

• Author entry and list of the described plant names for Vicente Cervantes at the IPNI

Single receipts

1. ^ ^{A b} Emilio Cervantes: Doscientos cincuenta aniversario del nacimiento de Vicente Cervantes y doscientos veinte de la fundación del Jardín Botánico de la Ciudad de México . March 10, 2008, accessed April 14, 2008
2. ↑ La Gaceta: La villa celebrará en noviembre el 250 aniversario de Vicente Cervantes . Daily newspaper from Sunday, March 9, 2008, p. 25
3. ↑ ^{a b} José Luis Maldonado Polo: La expedición botánica a Nueva España, 1786-1803: El Jardín Botánico y la Cátedra de Botánica  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Historia Mexicana, No. 001, pp. 5-56, 2000  
4. ↑ Lotte Burkhardt: Directory of eponymous plant names . Extended Edition. Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin, Free University Berlin Berlin 2018. [1]