As aves do Pará segundo as "memórias" de Dom Lourenço Álvares Roxo de Potflis (1752)

Abstract

Dom Lourenço Álvares Roxo de Potflis (1699-1756), cantor of the Belém Cathedral, in the ancient Estado do Grão-Pará e Maranhão, is the author of a manuscript on the birds of Pará, sent to the French naturalist Charles Marie de La Condamine in 1752. Deposited in the library of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris (MS 2251), this document includes the description of 16 birds of prey, a list of 82 popular names and 65 coloured plates depicting Amazonian birds. As far as known, this is the only part effectively written by Potflis of an ambitious work about the three natural kingdoms of Amazonia, entitled "Memórias zoológicas, fitológicas e mineralógicas ou descrições fisico-históricas das mais notáveis produções animais, vegetais e minerais do Estado do Grão-Pará". Although he died four years after writing that first part, leaving unconcluded a second one treating other birds, Dom Lourenço appears as one of the first Luso-Brazilians interested in the natural history of Brazil, preceding Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira by almost half a century and also the texts and iconographies of the Italian Antonio Giuseppe Landi and the Portuguese Francisco Antônio Sampaio.