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The Enlightenment Comes to the Amazon

机译：启蒙来到亚马逊

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In 1735, a team of French and Spanish scientists traveled to South America as members of the Geodesical Expedition to the Equator. Their goal was to help determine the true shape of the Earth: Was it flattened at the poles and bulging around the equator (as the work of Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens suggested), or was the bulge at the poles rather than at the equator (as the French Cartesianists would have it)? To settle this matter, the Paris Academie des Sciences commissioned two metrological expeditions: one to Lapland, near the North Pole, and the other to Quito, near the equator. Measuring the length of a meridian arc of one degree at each of these two sites and comparing the results would resolve the issue. As it turned out, Newton was correct. The equatorial expedition entailed unprecedented international cooperation, because Spain had long forbid- den foreigners to travel in its American dominions. It also provided a wide European public with rare information about equatorial South America, the fabled land of the Incas, the Amazons and El Dorado. For the next nine years, the team traveled widely, conducting geodesical measurements. Its members also gathered information about a territory that Europeans still knew little about 200 years after the Spanish conquest of the Inca empire.
机译：1735年，法国和西班牙的科学家团队以大地测量远征队成员的身份前往南美。他们的目标是帮助确定地球的真实形状：它是在两极变平并在赤道附近隆起（如艾萨克·牛顿和克里斯蒂安·惠更斯的著作所暗示的那样），还是在两极而不是赤道上隆起（就像法国笛卡尔主义者那样）？为解决此问题，巴黎科学院委托了两次计量考察：一次前往北极附近的拉普兰，另一次前往赤道附近的基多。在这两个位置分别测量一个子午线弧度的长度并比较结果将解决此问题。事实证明，牛顿是正确的。赤道探险需要空前的国际合作，因为西班牙长期以来一直禁止外国人进入其美国领土。它还向广大欧洲公众提供了有关赤道南美洲，印加人传说中的土地，亚马逊河和埃尔多拉多的稀有信息。在接下来的九年中，团队进行了广泛的测地测量。其成员还收集了有关西班牙征服印加帝国200年后欧洲人仍不了解的领土的信息。

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