Odo of Good

Odón de Buen y del Cos (Zuera, Spain, 1863-Mexico 1945) was a Spanish naturalist exiled in Mexico in 1942 who stood out as the founder of Spanish oceanography.

Biographical information

Odón de Buen y del Cos was born on November 18, 1863 in the Zaragoza town of Zuera. His father was Mariano de Buen y Ropin and his mother, Petra del Cos y Corroza.

Together with his parents, he moved to Zaragoza to study high school. Aware of the great effort that the move to the Aragonese capital entailed for the family, he gave refresher classes to other students.

After finishing high school with honors, he entered the university. He chose to study natural sciences, for which it was necessary to transfer him to Madrid. Knowing the great economic effort that he involved, and aware of his talent, the Zuera City Council unanimously decided to grant him a scholarship.

During his stay in Madrid, he had the opportunity to further his studies with Máximo Laguna and José Macpherson, with whom he began to study petrography in the Madrid mountains. At this time, and to help himself financially, he began to give private classes, one of his students being Miguel Primo de Rivera. During this period Odón carried out studies of herbs and plants that he would later include in his Annals of Natural History , published in 1883.

Together with Vicente Castelló he created the Spanish Scientific Yearbook.

The frigate WhiteOn the left, in the battle of Abtao.

After a trip to his homeland, where a cholera epidemic had been declared in 1885, from which his father died, having taken care of his family, Odón returns to Madrid. There he received the news of having been selected to carry out scientific research aboard the old frigate Blanca , a survivor of the battle of Callao.

This trip, prepared by the Navy, had been intended to go around the world as midshipman training but, for budgetary reasons, it was reduced to a two-stage trip: the first through northern Europe, and the second by the Mediterranean and North Africa. On both voyages, in which there was no shortage of hardships, Odón de Buen's oceanographic vocation was formed, as he relates in his memoirs:

I acquired in that journey the definitive orientation for my future personal life. I met the sea and watched it: magnificent, imposing and despising the insignificance of our wooden boat. I found expert men, aware of the superiority of human intelligence. I felt an insatiable desire to know the secrets hidden under the waves and the causes of the origin of life in the oceans. I made the decision to dedicate myself to the oceanography, which was at the beginning.

During this trip he collected important materials that were used to classify them later. Among them, two species of isopods that were classified, in allusion to him, as Metropontus bueni and Porcelio bueni.

A fan of writing, he recounted the adventures of the trip in his work From Kristanía to Tuggurt.

After this trip, he sought economic stability that would allow him to marry, and, after several attempts, he won the chair of zoology at the University of Barcelona in 1889, a position he held until 1911, when he moved to Madrid.

During his stay in Barcelona, he completely reformed science teaching at that university: he introduced advanced scientific material, established laboratory practices and field trips, and established close relations with the Banyuls Biological Station. His extensive manuals explained natural phenomena with evolutionary approaches and bluntly.

Odón also participated in politics, spreading republican and freethinking ideas. He was a collaborator of Las Dominicales del Libre Pensamiento , directed by Fernando Lozano y Montes, whose daughter, Rafaela, he married in 1889. The couple had six children.

He held the political positions of councilor of Barcelona (1903) and senator of the province of Barcelona (1907-1910).

Odón de Buen was one of the main disseminators of Darwin's theory of evolution in Spain, but this earned him the opposition of Cardinal Salvador Casañas y Pagés, who declared his teachings heretical. The cardinal's opposition succeeded in removing Odón de Buen from the chair in 1895. Subsequently, he was welcomed by the French government, who appointed him an official of public instruction.

He published a complete Historia natural (zoology, botany and geology) with illustrations and engravings that was widely accepted both in Spain and in America, despite the fact that the most conservative sectors of education promoted the prohibition of these books as contrary to the doctrines of the Catholic Church, which put them on the Index of prohibited books, but Odón de Buen did not impose his books, so any attempt to officially remove them from teaching was unsuccessful.

His separation from the professorship caused numerous protests and riots among the students, who even stoned the bishop's house and that of other people notorious for their clericalism. De Buen transferred his classes to the hall of the Federal Center and continued with his outings to the fields, but the riots did not stop and in the end, during the Christmas holidays, the Government, advised by General Valeriano Weyler, General Captain of Catalonia, ordered that Odón will resume his classes.

In 1906 he inaugurated the Marine Biological Laboratory in Portopí (Mallorca) and later others in Málaga, Vigo and Santa Cruz de Tenerife, where generations of oceanographers were trained. In 1914 he founded the Spanish Institute of Oceanography, thus initiating the field of oceanographic research in Spain.

Starting in 1908, he carried out a series of maritime campaigns aboard the Averroes, a well-equipped ship that belonged to the Navy, and with which De Buen was able to draw navigation charts, study the funds of the Strait of Gibraltar and analyze the Mediterranean currents, fauna and flora.

Photograph by Odón de Buen published in the magazine La Ilustració Catalana in 1907.

During this period, Odón de Buen met other scientists at the Francisco Ferrer Guardia Modern School, including Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Andrés Martínez Vargas. He collaborated in his Bulletin and joined his board of trustees, gave numerous conferences and wrote five books on natural sciences, which served as textbooks in that center. At that time, he received numerous awards and decorations, both domestic and foreign.

In 1911, he moved to Madrid, where he continued his pedagogical work, always defending scientific, complete and experimental teaching. In this city, he resumed his friendship with Ramón y Cajal and with his former student Miguel Primo de Rivera.

From November 17 to 20, 1919, the "international conference for the scientific exploration of the Mediterranean" attended by Albert I of Monaco.

During all this time, he was also concerned with improving his hometown, Zuera, for which he succeeded in building a School Group, which currently bears his name. The sculptor Mariano Benlliure modeled a bust for this center, a reproduction of which was delivered to the University of Zaragoza, which exhibits it in its Auditorium as a tribute to the oceanographer. Another copy is in the mausoleum that has been erected for him in Zuera.

During the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, the General Directorate of Fisheries was created, to which the Institute of Oceanography was annexed. Odón de Buen was appointed its general director, retaining this position during the Second Republic.

In 1934, he reached retirement age, after forty-five years of uninterrupted teaching, during which 25,000 students had passed through his classrooms. However, Odón did not abandon the investigation.

The Civil War surprised him in Palma de Mallorca working in his laboratory, and he was arrested by the rebels and sent to prison. On the same days, his son Sadí, a doctor, remembered above all for his efforts to eradicate malaria, was arrested in Córdoba and was shot on September 3. The privations and harshness of prison aggravated his diabetes. He was sent to the hospital, where he recovered with the help of doctors who had been his students. At the hospital, after dinner, he would give talks to other patients on marine biology.

The Danish and British consuls contacted him in prison and lobbied for his release. After a year in prison, he was released in exchange for the daughter and sister of the late Miguel Primo de Rivera, whom he had prepared for his admission to the General Military Academy of Zaragoza in 1870.

At the end of the war, Odón de Buen went to Banyuls, where his wife, Rafaela Lozano, died in 1941.

Mural dedicated to Odon de Buen in Zuera, his hometown.

In 1942, he went into exile in Mexico, where he died in 1945, at the age of eighty-two. Most of his surviving children or grandchildren who accompanied him did not return to Spain, and several of them, such as Rafael, an oceanographer, made an outstanding contribution to the academic and professional life of the country that welcomed them. His son Víctor de Buen Lozano, an industrial and aeronautical engineer, returned to Barcelona, where he held a chair at the School of Industrial Engineers and other public positions of high responsibility.

During Franco's dictatorship, his name was relegated to oblivion.

In 2003, his mortal remains were transferred from Mexico to Zuera, his hometown, where they were buried in a mausoleum in the town's municipal cemetery. In 2006, the remains of his wife, Rafaela Lozano, were moved from France to Zuera, where they currently rest alongside those of Odón de Buen.

Quotes

In the future, Oceanography must be the common basis of our work. It will be the science that fills and brings together all the conclusions of Geodesy and Geophysics, limited as they have been, so far, almost exclusively to the continents. I dream of that Oceanography empire, as the oceans have been all in the past of the Earth and still dominate. Since the oceans belong to all and no one possesses them, they belong to the most daring thoughts, to the most entrepreneurial scientific spirits, to the most difficult human labor and to the best organized, to the most civilized peoples and to the most powerful. They will be the field of all the efforts of science and exploration must be collective and their exploitation rationalized by common agreements. They still retain transcendental scientific revelations and unexplored wealth. Oceanography is therefore an international science and must always be so.

Work

The work of Odón de Buen is very extensive and is completely dispersed also due to the circumstance of exile.

In addition to his scientific work, he translated Garibaldi's memoirs and a biography of Ignacio Jordán Claudio de Asso y del Río.

The Fernando el Católico Institution and the Zuera City Council have begun the task of compiling the work of the famous oceanographer, and reissuing some of his books, such as Synthesis of a political and scientific life, From Kristianía to Tuggurt (travel impressions), both published in 1998, or My Memoirs (Zuera, 1863-Toulouse, 1939), published in 2003. In 2018 Letters to a farmer (1887-1894) edited by Antonio Calvo Roy.

Odón de Buen wrote his memoirs in Banyuls, at the age of seventy-six, and the 1,177 pages are kept by his family to this day. The Zuera Library has undertaken the task of compiling De Buen's work, and already has an important collection available to scholars and researchers.

Honors

• The oceanographic ship Odon de Buen of the Spanish Institute of Oceanography bears that name in his honor.
• Revista Odonprepared by the Centro de Estudios Odón de Buen.
• Centro de Estudios Odón de Buen, in Zuera, Zaragoza.
• Professor of Natural History
• Founder and director of the Spanish Institute of Oceanography
• Senator and Councillor for the Province of Barcelona (1907-1910)
• Councillor of Barcelona City Council (1903)
• Honorary Member of the London Geographical Society
• President of the Zoological Society of France
• Spanish Representative at the Opening of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco
• Vice-President of the International Union of Biological Sciences
• Chairman of the Atlantic Exploration Commission
• Member of the Pacific Exploration Commission
• President of the Ibero-American Oceanographic Council
• President of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics
• Vice-President of the Physical Geography Section at Cambridge
• Permanent Member of the International Congress Commission of Zoology
• President of the San Sebastian International Fisheries Congress
• Vice-President of the International Fisheries Congress in Paris
• President of the Delegation of the Convention on Fisheries with Portugal (Lisbon, 1933)
• President of the Higher Council of Culture in Spain
• President of the International Oceanographic Union
• President of the I International Congress of Hydrographic Oceanography and Continental Hydrology
• Delegate of Spain in several meetings of the International Hydrographic Bureau (Monegasque Office)
• Member of the Permanent International Council for the Exploration of the Sea Bureau in Copenhagen
• Vice-President of the International Zoology Congresses held in Monaco, Budapest, Padua and Lisbon
• Member of the Board of Trustees of the Prince of Monaco (Profiting Committee)
• Public Instruction Officer, France
• Chairman of the International Commission for the Use of Tuna
• President of the Sciences Section of Madrid
• Honorary Professor, Faculty of Sciences, University of San Marcos de Lima
• Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Bordeaux
• Member of the Franco-Spanish Approximation Committee during World War I

Awards

• Silver Plate of the Monaco Museum Foundation
• Medal of Cooperation on the Lady's journey around the world led by Captain J. Schmidt.
• Grand Cross of Alfonso XII
• Grand Cross of the Crown of Italy
• Commander of the Legion of Honour of France
• San Mauricio and San Lázaro (Italy)
• Diner of the Maritime Merit of France
• Grand Officer of San Carlos (Monaco)
• Great Military Cross of Christ and Great Cross of James and the Bride (Portugal)
• Grand Cross of the Republic
• Predilect Son of the Villa de Zuera (2003)
• Adoptive Son of the Island of Mallorca (2004)
• Adoptive Son of the Villa de Valdecabras (see Valdecabras and Cuenca province)
• Predilent Son of Malaga January 31, 1936

Family

He was the father of Rafael de Buen Lozano, Víctor de Buen Lozano, Fernando de Buen Lozano, Demófilo de Buen Lozano, Eliseo de Buen Lozano and Sadí de Buen Lozano.

Additional bibliography

• Good, Odon (2003). My memories (Zuera, 1863-Toulouse, 1939). Zaragoza: Institution Fernando el Católico y Ayuntamiento de Zuera. ISBN 84-7820-687-6.
• Good, Odon (1998). From Kristiania to Tuggurt (travel impressions). Zaragoza: Institution Fernando el Católico y Ayuntamiento de Zuera. ISBN 84-7820-475-X.
• Good, Odon (1998). Synthesis of a political and scientific life (facsimile of the edition of Buenos Aires, Publications of the Spanish-Argentine Patronate of Culture, 1944|formato= requires |url= (help)). Zaragoza: Institution Fernando el Católico y Ayuntamiento de Zuera. ISBN 84-7820-474-1.