Armand David: A er investigating the panda kingdom

2000/11/01 Altonaga, Kepa - EHUko biologia irakaslea Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Zoologia
• Historia
• Sariak

A deer at the starting point

Jean-Pierre-Armand David Halsouet was born in Ezpeleta, Lapurdi, on September 7, 1826, in the Bergara house. His father, Fructueux-Dominique-Génie David, was a local doctor, and in a time of rebellion. It was he who created the passion for nature and taught him many things. His mother, Rosalie Halsouet, was from Baiona and seems to be a good family.

Armand David was ordained a priest in 1850 in Paris (24 years) as a Lazarist. He was a professor in Savona (Italy) until 1861 and in 1862 he arrived in Beijing (36 years) as a missionist. However, he arrived in China with the orders of many professors of the Museum of Natural History of Paris to collect copies of native fauna and flora and send them to France.

At first he studied the language and its sides, especially making small trips in and around Beijing. In these excursions he composed very interesting zoological and botanical collections and sent them to Paris. The museum experts were surprised: on the one hand, at the time when China was unknown and, therefore, everything that was collected was of great interest. But on the other hand, in Armand David they saw a brave, skilful and cultured collector. Therefore, a gold brooch.

The most important discovery of these years is due to an esamesa. In Beijing the fame of sseu-pou-siang had become popular in Chinese, but no one knew this animal, which lived exclusively in the emperor's park, to which access was punished with the death penalty. However, the tartaric soldiers of the park greased them with money and saw inside the park the face of this mysterious sseu-pou-siang, a hundred specimens. He discovered that they belonged to a kind of unknown deer and lived nowhere else outside the imperial park.

With more money he won the skeletons and skins of two deer. Sent to Paris, his Alphonse Milne-Edwards considered a very interesting species: He assigned the taxonomic name of Elaphurus davidianus. Since then, the Beijing Embassy made several efforts to get the living individuals from the deer of their father David, who after a series of circumstances achieved a breeding pair. And later also Great Britain and Germany, all thanks to the help of Armand David. Thus, a few couples reached the zoos of Europe and there they reproduced quite easily. Even David's deer was hybridized with the local deer. However, all David's deer died of lack of responsibility or when they realized it.

However, the real concern for the future of his father David's deer did not come until the cake of Beijing's imperial park was destroyed. In fact, in 1900, the same year as Armand David's death, there was the uprising of the boxers and, as we saw in 55 days at Beijing, the Western powers, under the orders of Charlton Heston, sent the international "pacifying" force. The film, the lucky pacifying force, ate each and every one of the deer of David, the father of the imperial park, so it was just discovered for the science of the species.

Those who are going to see and remember the movie are going to visualize quite easily the hostile, enemy and xenophobic environment that Armand David found in China. For example, we cannot forget that years before the European colonial powers defeated China in the "opium gerlan", etc. This hatred of foreigners had long roots and, among other things, was sown by the foreigners themselves. Discover how the Biscayan missionary Eusebio Bengoa Akordagoitia told us in 1913: ...at about 40 years of age, the English and the Pranzasse have entered our days, shooting you. Elaphurus davidianus, as we have said, was destroyed in both the European zoos and the Beijing Imperial Park. However, before this happened, fortunately the Duke of Bedford collected and released a dozen specimens in his fields, where they multiplied quite well, despite the obstacles. At present, the species appears to be healthy and has been re-introduced in China near Xangai.

Donate the body to science

As already mentioned, the excellent quality of the biological material he sent to Paris surprised the experts of the Museum of Natural History, who freed Armand David from there to collect samples and data throughout China. The Lazarist friar was asked to free his father David from evangelical works to immerse himself in natural works. And so, from 1866, Armand David became a songwriter for the Celestial Empire, in charge of the Museum of Natural History of Paris. He made three main expeditions from Beijing: one to Mongolia, the second to Tibet and the last to cross China, from north to south.

In addition to miles, the effort of these routes can be measured in many ways. In the words of Manex Hiriart-Urruti: Who knows how many times of tiredness, sweat, hunger and thirst, has suffered internal decay, strange people and often the enemy? Apart from the bandits, rebels, etc., or from the times when he became ill with rheumatism, typhus, dysentery and malaria, eye!, he was poisoned by tea on three paths: this is what Armand David says in the travel diaries written by himself. In fact, on the back of his last trip he became so badly ill, having to give him a holy wave, about to die. He suffered from everything.

Hunting Panda

Undoubtedly, the trip to Tibet is the most famous, since it was in him where he made his most outstanding discoveries, such as the famous panda. However, Armand David did not reach Tibet: It reached the Principality of Moupin and, in fact, that principality was a promature land for Armand David, where it found the most interesting animals and plants. There he spent nine months (from March 1869 to November), and some of the Eurotaris moved quite a bit in health.

Before arriving at Moupin, already in the capital of the province of Sichuan, Chengdu, the bishop told him that he would find a polar bear, among other things. However, Armand David was not entirely convinced and thought that the polar bear in question, if it were real, would be an albino variety of the Himalayan black bear Ursus thibetanus. Soon after, however, he saw his polar bear skin (and so much black) hanging on the portal wall of one of Moupin's neighbours.

For this reason, he was given the desire to acquire a copy and so he promised his hunters: the white-black bear as fast as possible! According to Armand David's travel diary, the hunters returned on March 23, 1869, after ten days of separation, and among others, they brought him a young "polar bear". He was captured alive, but sadly killed to facilitate his transport. The polar bear was sold somewhat expensive.

In fact it was almost entirely white, the four life-saving and brackish branches, the ears and the eye contours, which were black. Armand David considered it a new species in sight and in the eye, and even considered it as a species of the urtids group, that is, as a member of the harvest.

Later, on April 1 the hunters sold him another mature panda and on April 15 another. In addition, they told him that Ursus thibetanus was easier to catch than the black bear, and that it was much more scarce, and what surprised him most was that, although he believed that it was a devastating animal, he fed bamboo leaves, as they told him. As mentioned above, Armand David realized in the trailer the importance of the discovery made and sent to Paris, without delay, a provisional description of the new species for immediate publication. Thus, it was the first scientific presentation of the great panda, so Father David is the descriptor of the species, in addition to being the first Western to find in nature. The newly found species receives the binomial name of Ursus melanoleucus, believing that it was a white-black bear; currently Ailuropoda melanoleuca is used.

Among the animals of the world, the big panda is one of the few; there are fewer than a thousand pandas in everything, and it seems that it will become an animal of the past in the near future. But, besides being one of the scarcest animals, it is one of the most prestigious. The main reasons for this are perhaps two, their black and white wavy appearance and their black future. The cuitated and caressed teddy bear is today a charismatic animal: Selected as a symbol by the conservation organization World Wildlife Fund, it has become quite famous. On the other hand, a chain of British toy stores sells more than 30,000 pandas a year; the total sale of toy pandas in the world is $1,640,000.

The golden nasal monkey can illuminate us

It seems that the panda eclipses everything else in the life of Armand David, but it is not so. For example, the same day that he found his great panda, the same hunters carried out the madness of the flying squirrel Pteromys alborufus. As mentioned, Moupin was a promature land for Armand David. He also found the monkey Macacus thibetanus in Moupin. In the travel diary he tells us that it was exciting to see that casual looking monkey very close to bleeding and giving the last breath, shot in white snow.

On May 4, 1869 the hunters brought him six monkeys, belonging to a species hitherto unknown. These apes, soft golden monkeys, lived in the wooded areas of the 3000 m mountains, in areas still snowy.

At the Paris Museum, Alphonse Milne-Edwards stared at the animal with a bluish green or turquoise face and a very short nose with an intense orange head. Cover of silk dorsal fur. Seeing the colors of this snow monkey, Milne-Edwards celebrates the 16th. He recalled a picture of the twentieth century depicted by a famous courtier. That courtier, the young Russian Roxellana, had a red tail and anklet and a short and attractive nose. Roxellana was kidnapped by Turkish pirates in Eastern Europe Galicia and subsequently sold as a slave to the arena of Sultan Suleiman Handia. Roxellana's eye was proud and alive, with a large light blue eye, and a small mouth and a sweet spadaña. Milne-Edwards had very similar noses to the short ones of the golden monkey and the eye of the sultan, something that seemed grotesque to him. And so, he named Rhinopithecus roxellana for science.

Leaving aside other questions of the golden monkey, we bring here a quite striking fact. And what is that data? Well, Rhinopithecus roxellana has been used on occasion as an explanation of the myth of the yeti. In fact, in order to find a rational explanation for the myth of the yeti, in 1937 it was proposed that the handful of eyes and traces found in the snow could be of some sort of monkey, which provoked a long scientific debate. In this thread, the Guy Dollman of the British Museum warned of the presence of two species of monkeys in the area of the Himalaia, two possible trunks, the sacred Semnopithecus entellus and the golden monkey Rhinopithecus roxellana of David.

Despite his credibility and his transversality, Armand David alluded to the Yeti in his diary to show the scientific character of the Chinese. It says: Everyone will tell you that the orangutan lives here in the mountains; they call jen-sioung, human bear. Of course, that variopinto jen-sioung is the yeti and not the orangutan.

Evolutionist thanks to pheasants

Back and forth we arrived in 1870. Upon his return from Moupin, due to his lack of health and the massacred discovery of Tientsen's Lazarist mission, Armand David must return to Europe to recover. And that is precisely the days of the Franco-Rusian war. That is why he stayed in Italy, in the home of a former student, the Marquis of Giacomo Doria. And there he read Charles Darwin's 1859 book on the Origin of Species.

In 1872 he returned to China to undertake his third exploration trip. During his trip to China he was fascinated by his pheasants. The truth is that from the beginning they became spectacular. According to the diary of their third trip, they are almost 40 species, distributed mainly by Tibet; they are endemic, that is, they only live there and nowhere else.

Based on this fact, Armand David argues that these adjacent, adjacent species have been created and settled individually. However, still, would it not be more rational to think that, once God has placed the basic pheasant on the ground, this basic pheasant has undergone various transformations that have led to its racial and varietal disaggregation to the creation of new species and new genera distributed around the area of origin?

I've had a long spree and I don't know how tired I've been, but have you realized the transcendence of what I've mentioned before? Armand David appears as an evolutionist in the book published in 1875 if we want a dimmed evolutionism, but in the line of Darwin in any case. I find it surprising for two reasons. On the one hand, let us not forget Armand David XIX. Abbot of the twentieth century. Secondly, for complicated historical reasons, French scientists accepted evolutionism a little late. Armand David was a pioneer.

This is, somehow, one of the greatest sages who have left the Eskual-herria, Armand David, the father of the panda, the great Ezpelese naturalist who died in Paris on November 10, 1900.