A second book and of greater importance was that by Padre Antonio Ruiz de Montoya called _Conquista espiritual hecha por los religiosos de la Compañía de Jesús en las provincias del Paraguay, Paraná, Uruguay y Tape_. It was a volume of two hundred quarto pages, and was published in Madrid in 1639. Montoya, as if defending himself against criticism beforehand, on account of his style and lack of proper arrangement of his material, confesses his rusticity imposed by long residence among savages; and that he wrote from memory and without the documents that ought to have guided his pen, so that the result was a mass of information thrown together without system or order. [Sidenote: Techo’s _Historia_] [Sidenote: Gist of Techo’s book] The project of writing a complete general history of the province of Paraguay had been variously considered when it was taken up energetically by Padre Juan Pastor, who had long been a missionary in Paraguay. He completed it in two folio volumes in manuscript, but, when he died in 1658, the work had not been published; and after Techo had made large use of the manuscript in his history of the province of Paraguay, the project to publish it was dropped. Nicolás de Techo was a native of France, born in Lille. His name was Nicolas de Toict, and his history bore the title _Historia Provinciae Paraquariae Societatis Jesu_. It is divided into fourteen books, and makes a folio volume of four hundred pages, beginning with a geographical description of the La Plata region. Entering upon his main subject the author gives an account of the mission of the first Jesuits from Peru and from Brazil in 1586. Then follows an account in chronological order of the events within his field until 1645. Techo probably intended to write another volume, but his plan was apparently not carried out. An English translation of this book was published in Churchill’s _Collection of Voyages and Travels_ (IV, 638-749). The author, a Jesuit, was naturally especially interested in the history of his order’s missionary activity among the Indians, the foundation and growth of the Paraguayan missions. The translator, referring to the “abundance of miracles and other pious matters” with which the author had overloaded his book, announces that he has taken care to eliminate these things in his effort to make his translation “acceptable to the reader.” But in the account of the dreadful famine during the first settlement at Buenos Aires he seems to find no reason to expunge the story of the lioness, which Techo relates in all sobriety: [Sidenote: Story of the lioness]