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116 The era of lIberalIsm “Paz, educación y prosperidad material” (= ‘Peace, education and material prosperity’) Slogan of the liberal reform in Guatemala, 1871 “The immense ideological power of the Church was a notorious characteristic in the formation of Central American society… The establishment of secular power was slow and difficult; a first attempt was made in the second half of the XVIII century, under the Bourbons of enlightened Spain. But one has to wait until the end of the XIX century to observe a moderate laic triumph: this is the liberal era, the era of positivism, of education controlled by the State and the definitive consecration of freedom of religion (Pérez Brignoli, 2000: 27)”. “... the fight between liberals and conservatives (clericals) fills the history of Central America in the second half of the century...” (Halperin Donghi, 2001: 258). In Guatemala the liberal revolution triumphed in 1871, dominated by the figure of president Justo Rufino Barrios, who was responsible for a radical agrarian reform and the expropriation of ecclesiastical possessions. In 1876 liberal ideas gained strength in El Salvador, during the presidency of Rafael Zaldívar (1876-1885) and under strong Guatemalan influence. Nicaragua and Honduras were an exception, with reforms that were frustrated or incomplete. While Walker’s defeat in Nicaragua was followed by more than thirty years of conservative governments, regional fragmentation, difficulties in communications and backwardness hindered in Honduras the consolidation of the State. In Costa Rica, the liberal reforms initiated in the forties by president Braulio Carrillo were continued by president José María Castro Madriz, who fought for public education and for the freedom of the press, and by the ‘progressive authoritarianism’ of dictator Tomás Guardia (1870-1882). The first public schools and the first universities of Central America were founded during those years. “After most of Latin America achieved independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century, foreign naturalists began to visit the new republics, as part of a flood of foreign soldiers, miners, engineers, adventurers, missionaries and others. The botany practiced by these foreign naturalists was essentially LANKESTERIANA LANKESTERIANA 9(1—2), August 2009. © Universidad de Costa Rica, 2009. extractive. They extracted botanically significant plants in much the same way that foreign corporations such as the United Fruit Company extracted bananas from Central America… By the late nineteenth century, the most important herbaria of Latin American plants were to be found in Europe and North America… Beginning in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, however, many Latin American countries began to produce their own botanical inventories and national floras. The growing official interest in the natural world coincides with the liberal era in Latin America that lasted roughly from 1870 to 1930. National botanical inventories appealed to Latin America’s liberal elites for ideological and practical reasons. During the liberal era, national governments pursued the goals of ‘order and progress’, enlisting science and technology to help rationalize and modernize the state, the economy, and society. They pursued economic growth through the export of tropical commodities – ranging from industrial commodities such as rubber and henequen to luxury foods such as coffee, sugar and bananas. This meant that during the liberal era many Latin American economies -and by extension the states- depended heavily upon plants… The leaders in each country began to take an interest in botany that offered the possibility of increasing the production of existing export crops and of discovering new ones. Many Latin American governments established or revived national botanical gardens, agricultural experiment stations, and natural history museums, whose research agendas included surveying the nation’s plants, compiling national herbaria and, most significantly, producing national floras” (McCook, 2002: 514-515). Liberal ideas also led to the creation of private gardens and collections, combining leisure with scientific interests. In the history of the orchids of Central America the legendary orchid hunter began to be displaced by the scientific collector. Although great quantities of plants where still collected and sent to Europe and later to the United States, the shipments of herbarium specimens began to outnumber those of live plants. A further contribution to this development were the improvement of methods for the reproduction of orchids from seed in England, which began in 1849 and the production of the first hybrids by John Dominy in 1854. “Gradually […] the interest in imported species waned as commercial success in orchid hybridization
ossenbaCh — Orchids and orchidology in Central America increased” (Reinikka, 1995: 66). The era of the great collectors, of the great adventurers and gatherers of living plants, came slowly to an end, and gave way to a large group of scientific travelers, whose main interest was the collection of herbarium specimens. An additional reason for this change were the rising costs of the expeditions. As Boyle wrote in 1893, “twenty years ago, nearly all the great nurserymen in London used to send out their travellers; but they have mostly dropped the practice. Correspondents forward a shipment from time to time. The expenses of the collector are heavy, even if he draw no more than his due. [...] Then, grave losses are always probable –in the case of South American importations, certain. It has happened not once but a hundred times that the toil of months, the dangers, the sufferings, and the hard money expended go to absolute waste. Twenty or thirty thousand plants or more an honest man collects, brings down from the mountains or the forests, packs carefully and ships. [...] The cases arrive in England – and not a living thing therein!” (Boyle, 1983: 68). German (and other) collectors in the second half of the XIX century. Germany played always an important role in the history of Botany. When national unity was achieved, symbolized by the crowning of Wilhelm I as German Emperor in 1871, natural sciences received a new impulse. The Royal Herbarium in Berlin, created in 1815 under the tutelage of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences to host the collections of de C. L. Willdenow, became in 1879 the Royal Botanical Museum of Berlin, to which the Botanical Garden was attached in 1910.When the German Empire expanded during the 1880s, with the incorporation of the colonies of Cameroon, Togo, German South- West Africa, Eastern Africa, South Pacific Territories, Kiautschou, New Guinea and Samoa, a great wave of emigrants began to leave Germany. During the last 30 years of the XIX century more than 4 million Germans left for America, Africa and Asia in search of fortune. Great opportunities presented themselves to German explorers and scientists to explore little known territories. Reichenbach had, until his death in 1889, an inexhaustible source of new orchid species that were sent to him from all confines of the globe. His place would be occupied very soon by a young scientist 117 who, at the age of 19, embarked on his first exploratory mission to colonial Africa: Rudolf Schlechter. The new wave of German collectors in Central America began with Gustav Wallis (1830-1878) (Fig. 40F), who was born with a physical limitation: he was deaf and mute until six years of age, when he learned to articulate, although a speech defect persisted during his entire life (Reinika, 1995: 234). Despite of his problem, and of a childhood filled with penuries, he showed always an indomitable will and enormous energy. He learned gardening and botany in Germany, where he made his first collections while studying the flora of the Alps. He first traveled to America in 1856, collecting in Southern Brazil. In connection with a German house he started a horticultural establishment, but owing to the failure of the parent firm in 1858 Wallis was left practically penniless (Veitch, 1906: 63). He continued collecting in Brazil, employed by Linden, and explored the Amazonas River from its mouth in the Atlantic to its source. “At the end of September 1868, utterly exhausted by arduous journeys, he returned to Europe. ... He received the Great Gold Medal for Botany at the International Exhibition in Paris and also a premier prize from the Belgian Government” (Yearsley, 2007: 108). During the years of 1860 to 1864 he collected again in Brazil and passed in 1865 to Colombia y Ecuador, arriving in 1868 in Panama, from where he made an excursion to the border of Costa Rica. He returned to Europe and in 1869 came under contract with Veitch to explore the Philippines. He went to Japan and then to the United States and returned to Europe. He was sent in 1872 to Colombia, in what would be his last travel to South America. Upon the termination of his contract with the Veitches he continued to collect plants in South America, among them many orchids. Reinikka suggests that he arrived in Panama after 1875 (Reinikka, 1995: 235), but he must have been earlier in Central America, because Reichenbach described Trichocentrum capistratum Rchb. f., based on a collection by Wallis in Costa Rica in 1871, and Zygopetalum (= Kefersteinia) lacteum Rchb. f. (Wallis s.n., Panama) in 1872. The majority of his collections (as had the collections of Roezl some years before) arrived at the London market by intermediation of Eduard Ortgies, an important German orchid merchant based in Zurich, Switzerland (Anonymous, 1894: 225- 229). LANKESTERIANA 9(1—2), August 2009. © Universidad de Costa Rica, 2009.
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LANKESTERIANA 9(1-2): 1-268. 2009.
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In Belize, the Botanical Station wa
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despotism penetrated the social sec
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ut we believe that they resemble th
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Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco (Gómez-Po
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