Paraguay's first man of science: as a researcher, educator, and publisher, Moises Bertoni left a remarkable legacy in his adopted country, where today hundreds of tourists visit his former residence turned museum.

• Author: Ceaser, Mike

Not much about this thickly forested hillside overlooking the Parana River's green-brown waters suggests that it was once a center of scientific research. The white two-story house with its comfortable balcony standing several hundred feet above the river could well be the home of any industrious landowner. The thick rain forest, loud with yelling birds, is extraordinary only for the fact that it remains intact in a region in which nearly all the land has been cleared for soybean culture. Down the trail from the house, the little weed-grown cemetery, with its awry bricks and headstones worn smooth by wind and rain, could be that of any innumerable immigrant families who tried and failed to make a life for themselves in the Paraguayan wilds. For the visitors walking along the trails, the only clue to the property's remarkable history are the many little white signs that announce the plants' origins: a massive palm from Malaysia growing a few yards from slender ones native to the Canary Islands, both around a curve in the trail from an ancient, gnarled cactus from Peru.

Yet, for decades around the turn of the last century a Swiss immigrant turned this property into arguably the leading center of scientific studies in Paraguay. For, even under the thick forest canopy, Moises Bertoni was a man of unlimited horizons. From this tiny jungle outpost, connected to the world beyond only by river, he corresponded with centers of learning on five continents, carried out meteorological studies for the Paraguayan and Argentine governments, wrote scientific papers, and even operated Paraguay's first scientific publishing house. Bertoni also left his home long enough to play a defining role in the beginning of agricultural education in Paraguay. And today his name, which has reached legendary stature in Paraguay, lends support to one of the nation's most important environmental foundations.

For the young Bertoni, an isolated life of science in the Paraguayan jungle was not at all his intention when he set out from his native southern Switzerland in 1884. Born in 1857 in the tiny farm town of Lottigna in the Italian-speaking Blenio Valley, as a youth he displayed a wide-ranging passion for sciences and humanities. Before he was twenty, he had created the first meteorological observatory in Lottigna, written a geography book for schools, and investigated the growth of eucalyptus trees and local prehistoric languages. In 1875 he left to study law in Geneva and Zurich. Soon, however, he abandoned law to immerse himself in botany, although in 1876 he emerged long enough to marry his first and only love, Eugenia Rossetti. In 1884, money troubles forced Bertoni to abandon his studies, but by then his years in cosmopolitan cities had permanently changed his thinking by exposing him to the radical new political ideas then circulating. An idealistic and concerned youth, Bertoni was deeply influenced by socialist and anarchist writers who criticized the injustices of European society. Not one to stop at theorizing, however, Bertoni soon decided to put the ideas into practice. Later that year, a group of about thirty emigres from the Blenio Valley, including Moises and Eugenia and their five children--as well as Bertoni's treasured seed collection and scientific equipment--boarded the Nord-America and sailed for Argentina, where Bertoni dreamed of carrying out his utopian ideals in a farming colony in the northern province of Misiones, tucked between Paraguay and the Brazilian border. Two years before, he had written to Eugenia describing his vision and motivations:

"We will disdain a society ... that ridicules our human `superstitions,' and offers us its repugnant bread for the price of humiliation and brutishness.... You know how I wish to give relief to an old dream, of exploration and colonization."

However, the rigors of the wilds, hostility from neighboring landowners, and a lack of promised assistance from the Argentine government sent all the rest of the would-be settlers fleeing back home or to cities. Only the Bertonis...