This paper examines the system of production and circulation of knowledge linked to Spanish bureaucracy and the Atlantic trade. Based on primary sources from the General Archive of the Indies (AGI), the General Archive of the Nation (Argentina-AGN), the Archive of the Royal College of Surgeons (London-RCS), and on secondary bibliography, this article, rather than focus on the objects collected, considers the documents that resulted from the “necessity” of collecting minerals, plants and animals, revealing the true protagonists of this story: the pathways of bureaucracy and the flow of paperwork where data about nature and man in the Americas were generated and took shape. At the same time, it reflects on the adoption of the "three kingdoms of nature" defined by Linnaeus and adopted in the instructions to complete the Royal Cabinet of Natural History of Madrid, which, at the end of the XVIIIth century and as a result of these instructions, a strange and mighty animal found near Buenos Aires would arrive.
Irina Podgorny is an Argentine historian of science at the National University of La Plata, permanent RESEARCHER at CONICET, professor ad honorem and Director of the Archive of History and Photographs at the Museum of La Plata, and winner of the Bernardo Houssay Young Researcher and Georg Forster Research (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation) Awards . She has held numerous professorships and scholarships in Berlin, Paris, New York City, Rio de Janeiro, Canberra and held the Lewis P. Jones Professorship at Wofford College in South Carolina in 2012. Since 2021, she has been a co-director of an EU-funded project: Scientific Collections on the Move: Provincial Museums, Archives, and Collecting Practices (1850–1950), more details of which can be found here: https://scicomove.hypotheses.org/.
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