Author Description

"Nearly half a millennium ago, from 1571 to 1577, Francisco Hernández of Toledo, physician to the royal household of Spain, led a scientific mission to Mexico under the mandate (extended personally by Philip II) to catalog and create an inventory--with the help of a team of Nahuatl herbalists, painters, and doctors--of the medicinal plants of the New World. The result of said expedition was a document without precedent: sixteen books of texts and painted illustratoins constituted a veritable natural encyclopedia of the Americas worthy of Pliny the Elder himself. Entitled Tesoro Mexicano, this oeuvre followed an editorial path worthy of an adventure novel over the years; and indeed, those sixteen volumes soon became the stuff of legend. What we offer here is an extract, also of enormous worth, that shows the great beauty of the flora, fauna, and minerals characteristic of Mexico in that era. The product of intense collaboration between a group of outstanding tlacuilos and a Spanish physician, the Tesoro Mexicano was the first naturalist treatise of the New World"--Page 7.