Outside the limits of settled life the work of evangelisation was vigorously pursued by Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian friars, who from the first flocked to the New World in all its parts; but the chief share in this labour was borne by the newly-founded Company of Jesus. Among the exigencies which led to its establishment may certainly be reckoned the need of adequately grappling with the task of preaching Christianity in America, as well as in India and the Far East; and the numerous “Reductions” in the savage districts of North and South America abundantly testify to the devotion and energy of the Jesuit Fathers. At first the regular clergy greatly outnumbered the secular. In many cases they received, by dispensation, valuable benefices; and being in all respects better educated and trained than the secular clergy, they more easily acquired the American languages. The surplus incomes of these regularised benefices were remitted to the superiors of their incumbents in Europe, and were ultimately applied to the foundation of houses of the several Orders in the New World. The Franciscan, Augustinian and Jesuit colleges in Peru were in effect the chief centres of European civilisation; and the Jesuits have left a durable monument of their zeal in the Republic of Paraguay. To those members of these Orders who engaged in missionary work the ethnologist and historian are greatly indebted. But for their labours the deeply interesting history and folk-lore of Mexico and Peru would have been inadequately preserved, and the languages of many tribes outside the pale of settled life must have perished. Together with the fine churches attached to the mission settlements, the cathedral and parish churches of Spanish America, often built on the sites of ancient temples, form an unique series of historical monuments. Entirely built by native labour, and largely by voluntary contributions from native sources, they were to a great extent served by pastors of Indian or partly Indian descent—a class whom it was the policy of Spain to foster, and through which her control of her vast American dominions was in some measure maintained.
What was the effect of the New World in the realm of learning and science? Here, on the whole, the New World, at least in the first eighty years of its history, figures rather as a consequence than a cause. At Montaigne’s death Francis Bacon, designing to reconstruct the system of the sciences, was meditating and elaborating the great series of books and tractates in which his views were given to the world; and in many of his writings it is clear that America with its physical features, its plants and animals, and its aboriginal race, was largely the subject of his meditation, and that the vast array of facts associated with it enlarged and modified his opinions and forecasts. To some extent Bacon was the scholar of Montaigne, whose conception of America as the middle one of three island-continents which once lay westward of the Old World—the vanished Atlantis which gave its name to the Atlantic, the new-found America beyond it, and a third, still undiscovered, but probably soon to be revealed in the unknown expanses of the Pacific, and called by Bacon “New Atlantis,” as bearing the same geographical relation to the New World which the earlier Atlantis had borne to the Old—underlies his noble philosophical romance bearing that name as its title. Bacon’s habit of thought and study had induced in him a broader and profounder conception of the New World than that presented in the pages of his French predecessor. The phenomena of society, which chiefly attracted Montaigne, had for him only a secondary interest. Thirsting to know the Causes of Things, he aspired to comprehend nature in her entirety, to penetrate her secret, and to interpret her message: and the New World lent him opportune and unexpected help. The configuration of sea and land surfaces, the mountains, the tides and winds, the animals and plants of the New World, opened for the first time an enormous field of physical enquiry. The New World, for example, threw new light on the distribution of terrestrial and maritime areas. Like the continents of the Old World (Europe and Asia for the purpose of this comparison counting as one) both North and South America broadened out towards the north and tapered towards the south, the alternative principle of termination by variously shaped peninsulas being found here also to recur. What, Bacon asked, was the shape of that supposed continent lying south of the Strait of Magalhaes, and commonly called Terra Australis? The conflicting or according phenomena of the tides in different places; the water-spouts; the refrigeration of the air by icebergs on the Canadian coast; the balmy breezes blowing to seaward from Florida; the trade-winds, which had lent Europe wings to carry her across the Atlantic: the constant westerly or anti-trade winds blowing towards the Portuguese shore, from which, it was sometimes said, Colombo had inferred the existence of a western continent generating them; the comparatively cold climate of North America, the frozen expanse of Labrador being in the latitude of Britain, and the contradictory phenomena of the Peruvian coast, which lay almost under the Equator, while its ocean breezes, blowing hardest at the full moons, were said to produce a climate like that of Southern Europe; the strange inequalities of temperature experienced in different parts of the Peruvian Cordilleras; the alleged phenomenon that the peaks of the Andes remain destitute of snow, while it thickly covers their lower elevations, with the effects produced on man by their attenuated air, not so much cold as keen, piercing the eyes and purging the stomach;—such enquiries as these, never previously formulated, make Bacon the founder of modern physical geography. American man, in his physical and ethnological aspect, strongly attracted Bacon’s attention. Was the extraordinary longevity of the Brazilian and Virginian tribes, who retained manly vigour at the age of 120 years, connected with their practice of painting the skin? What was the cause of a similar phenomenon in Peru? Was it true, as some alleged, that the fearful “morbus gallicus,” then for the first time raging in Europe, and supposed, though erroneously, to have been imported from America, had its origin in the loathsome practice of cannibalism? What was the effect on American man of maize, as his staple diet? In America, where flint was scarce, fire was universally kindled by the wooden drill. The American Prometheus, then, in Bacon’s words, “had no intelligence with the European,” and the arts of life must have originated independently in the New World;—an inference somewhat boldly made from a single pair of facts, but which accorded, though Bacon knew it not, with the traditions of Mexico and Peru, and is amply confirmed, in our own well-informed age, by everything known as to the general progress of the American aborigines. By an effort of judgment for which the materials scarcely existed, and which had certainly never been made before his time, Bacon mentally arrayed against each other the polished nations of Europe and the barbarous or savage ones of America, and asked himself the reason of the contrast. Was it to be sought in the soil, in the sky, in the physical constitution of man? These suggestions he answered negatively; the difference, he concluded, lay solely in the fact that the American peoples, for some as yet unknown reason, had made less progress in the arts of life. We know the reason to be Nature’s parsimony in furnishing the western continent with animals capable of labour and amenable to domestication.
Here another question presented itself to this prince among thinkers. Was the project of planting the civilisation of Europe among the American savages—a project widely entertained in Western Europe—a feasible one? Bacon answered this also in the negative. Nor is it doubtful that, having regard to the contemporary idea of “planting,” Bacon was right. The idea of teaching the Indians “to live virtuously, and know of men the manner, and also to know God their Maker,” was not yet obsolete; and the Spaniards, according to their lights, were vigorously prosecuting the task in Mexico and elsewhere. It has been reserved for a later age, in most respects more advanced, to acquiesce in a system of colonisation which dispossesses the aboriginal owners of the soil, and deals with them as with vermin to be hunted down, or stamped