José Mariano Mociño was a botanist and educator from New Spain. He is remembered for early research on the ecology (especially botany), geology, and anthropology of his country and other parts of North America.
Background
José Mariano Mociño was born on September 24, 1757, in Temascaltepec, Viceroyalty of New Spain (now Mexico). In botanical literature, Mociño is the generally accepted spelling. The owner of the name always signed it Moziño. On the title page of Noticias de Nutka, it is written Moziño Suarez de Figueroa. His mother’s name was Manuela Losada, and the name under which his degree of bachelor of medicine was conferred was José Mariano Moziño Suares Losada. Nineteenth-century authors wrote the name Mocinno, Moçino, Mozino, or Mozinno.
Education
Being poor, Mociño worked in many different jobs to study in the Seminario Tridentino de México for a career in theology, philosophy, and history, then he turned to the natural sciences devoting himself especially to physics, mathematics, botany, and chemistry. In 1776 he received a Bachelor of Philosophy degree and was awarded an academic degree in scholastic theology and ethics in 1778. After medical training at the University of Mexico where he received a Bachelor of Medicine degree in 1787, he became committed to botany and completed the course in botany at the Royal Botanical Garden in Mexico City in 1789.
Early in his career around 1778-1784 José Mariano Mociño made a living as a philosophy teacher. After medical training at the University of Mexico, he became committed to botany, and in March 1790 he joined the Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain, which under the direction of Martin Sessé had been exploring in Mexico since 1787. He continued as a member of the expedition until its effective termination in 1804, traveling to western Mexico (1790-1791), to the coast of California and Nutka Island (1792-1793), the Atlantic slope of Mexico (1793-1794), and Central America (1795-1799).
When the period of exploration came to an end (1803), Mociño and Sessé went to Spain to complete their work and to get support for a new Flora Mexicana, to be based on their collections and the approximately 1,400 paintings made by the expedition’s artists, Athanasio Echeverria and Vicente de la Cerda. The Napoleonic government then in power in Spain did not support the Flora; Sessé died in 1808; Mociño assumed responsibility for the manuscripts and paintings, and when he was forced to leave Madrid with the retreating French (1812), he carried a part of the material with him to Montpellier, where he worked with the botanist Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle. Most of the manuscripts of the Flora Mexicana were lost before they came into Candolle’s hands, but most of the paintings were saved and some of them formed the bases for almost three hundred new species of plants described by Candolle. Candolle brought him to Geneva, where he became a professor at the University of Geneva. In 1818 he was authorized to return to Spain with what was left of the materials of the expedition, but he died in Barcelona during the trip back to Madrid, on June 12, 1820, as recorded in the death certificate issued by Manuel de Cots, vicar of the parish of San Jaime de Barcelona.
The Plantae Novae Hispaniae (1887-1891) and the Flora Mexicana (1891-1897), two posthumous volumes, together comprise almost the sum of the original publication which resulted from the Royal Botanical Expedition.
The names of Sessé and Mociño are commonly linked (and in that order) in any mention of the botanical work of the expedition, but their contributions seem to have been quite different. Both were competent and active botanists as shown by their existing analyses and descriptions of plants according to the Linnaean method. Sessé was the more competent administrator, with numerous responsibilities and an enormous amount of paperwork, and he seems to have delegated much of the purely botanical work to Mociño. The latter was charged, for example, with the preparation of Plantae Novae Hispaniae - the entire manuscript is in his handwriting - which he completed in a little over a year after joining the group. The archives at the Instituto Botánico in Madrid contain various inventories of paintings and specimens summarizing the botanical activities of the expedition; which inventories are also for the most part in Mociño's hand. The herbarium of Sessé and Mociño, which is also at Madrid, contains much internal evidence that Mociño began and attempted to carry on some final organization of the specimens leading to the publication of the Flora of New Spain. That Mociño was a scholar - neither merely a collector nor a menial assistant - is attested by the opinions of his contemporaries and by his surviving reports on his expeditions to Nutka and to the Volcán de Tuxtla in Veracruz.
Mociño studied to become a Catholic priest but abandoned this path to marry María Rita Rivera.
Personality
José Mariano Mociño had some facility with languages; he wrote Latin well, and when in Nutka he soon learned the language of the aborigines well enough to serve as the interpreter for the Spanish party.
Interests
Politicians
Joseph Bonaparte
Connections
José Mariano Mociño married María Rita Rivera in 1778, also another niece of his uncle José Luis de los Ríos, bishop of Oaxaca. The newlyweds moved with him in the city, where Mociño would take care of making a living as a philosophy teacher. However, after 7 years of life in Oaxaca, Mociño decided to study medicine, so he settled again in the Mexican capital, leaving María Rita with de los Ríos. The separation and subsequent divorce with his wife, niece of the powerful bishop caused problems that were, throughout his life, cause of legal and economic hardships.