National Gazette

From Townsend's Journey through Spain.

Description of Don Antonio Ulloa the Philosophical Historian of South America.

I FOUND him perfectly the philosopher, sensible and well informed, lively in his conversation, free and easy in his manners. Having observed at his door two soldiers mounting guard, I expected some pride of appearance, but I met with nothing like it. This great man, diminutive in stature, remarkably thin and bowed down with age, clad like a peasant, and surrounded by his numerous family of children, with the youngest, about two years old, playing on his knee, was sitting to receive morning visitors, in a room, the dimensions and furniture of which, for a few moments, diverted my attention from himself, the chief object of veneration. The room was twenty feet long by fourteen wide, and less than eight feet high. In this I saw dispersed confusedly, chairs, tables, trunks, boxes, books, and papers, a bed, a press, umbrellas, clothes, carpenter's tools, mathematical instruments, a barometer, a clock, guns, pictures, looking-glasses, fossils, minerals and shells, his kettle, basin, broken jugs, American antiquities, money, and a curious mummy, from the Canary islands, or at least its trunk, with the head and arms; for having been the common play-thing of his children, they had amused themselves with drawing its teeth and breaking off its limbs.

Among the extraneous fossils, he shewed me a variety of sea shells, collected by himself near the summits of the highest mountains in America, some on the surface, but many bedded in the lime-stone rock. When I went to take my leave of him on quitting Cadiz, he presented me with the Natural History of South-America, a work highly deserving to be translated.