An uncontacted four-legged people of the Marañón River?

Radoteur, Capitano [pseud.; i.e. Gaspare Giuseppe Maria di Po]. Relazione d'una nuova generazione d'uomini scoperta dal capitano Radoteur presso il fiume Marannon, ossia delle Amazzoni, da lui scritta a un suo amico, e trasportata dal Franzese in Italiano.

€ 1,800.00

Very rare satirical pamphlet: "a fictitious account of travels in northern Brazil involving the 'discovery' of a race of four-legged people" (James Ford Bell Library). Purportedly translated from the French of one "Captain Dotard", it targets the young Italian anatomist and obstetrician Pietro Moscati (1739-1824).

In ostensibly reporting the discovery of a quadruped "new kind of human" on the Peruvian Marañón River, the principal tributary of the Amazon, the anonymous author pokes fun at Moscati's just-published "Discorso delle corporee differenze essenziali che passano tra la struttura dei bruti e la umana", in which the physician had argued that the upright carriage of humans was an aberration of nature and man was originally designed to walk on all fours like beasts, while his bipedal posture proved to be the source of many diseases and other misfortunes. Moscati's "Discorso" attracted some notoriety in the early 1770s, and even Kant published a critical review of it in the Königsbergsche Gelehrte und Politische Zeitungen (1771). The Italian economist Pietro Verri is known to have sent his brother a copy of the present pamphlet on 29 August 1770, together with a letter in which he reveals the author as the "conte Po", that is Gaspare Giuseppe Maria conte Po, son of Gaspare Ferdinando, conte di Nerviano e Garbagnate (cf. Physis, Rivista internazionale di storia della scienza 3 [1961], p. 169).