The Franciscan friar José Torrubia (1698-1761) from Granada. Among fossils, the universal flood, and giants

Abstract

Among other anniversaries, this year, 1998, marks the 300th anniversary of the birth in Granada of Fray José Torrubia, a Franciscan monk, missionary, and naturalist who traveled all over the world. Torrubia is best known as the author of one of the most widely read scientific books of the 18th century: Aparato para la Historia Natural española (Apparatus for Spanish Natural History), published in Madrid in 1754. Torrubia's ideas on fossils, the Great Flood, and the existence of giants broke with the traditional thinking of his time. Our author ardently defended the animal origin of what naturalists called “petrifications,” “glossopetras,” and “figured stones,” which they interpreted as simple “games of nature” produced by a “plastic force” that springs from mysterious underground fluids. For Fray José Torrubia, these petrifications were the remains of animals and plants buried in the mud during the Great Flood, which cannot be explained by natural causes but only by supernatural ones.