But this belief was not well founded; he never left America. He was granted a pension by the viceroy, established himself at Cochabamba, and continued his scientific researches. The principal product of his inquiries was his _Historia natural de Cochabamba_. This was written in 1798. To the same period belong his _Memoria sobre los ríos navegables que fluyen al Marañón_ and _Descripción del Perú_. Numerous fragments of these works were published in the _Telégrafo mercantil_ but without his name. [Sidenote: Groussac on Haenke] Paul Groussac, who caused the Natural History of Cochabamba to be published in the first volume of the _Anales de la biblioteca_ characterized its style, in the preliminary essay on the life of Haenke, as “that of descriptive science, simple and positive, and as far from the incorrect creole verbosity as from the elegant precision of the French travellers.” Of Haenke he affirms “We find ourselves in the presence of a savant of high quality, worthy by his own ideas as well as by his vast and varied knowledge to take his place, if destiny had not decreed otherwise, in that illustrious galaxy near the end of the last century, in which Priestly, Scheele, and Lavoisier shine as stars of the first magnitude.”[226] [Sidenote: Haenke’s late years and death] But his marvellous zeal for exploration and investigation gradually waned; isolation, lack of the results attained by other investigators, the spiritual inertia of frontier conditions, and a relaxing climate wrought, in the course of time, their deadly work, dulling the acuteness of his mind, and destroying his energy. And the end, it is reported, was hastened by the carelessness of a servant, who, in his illness at his hacienda, administered by mistake a dose of poison in place of the beneficent medicine. He died in 1817. VIII [Sidenote: Santiago Cárdenas] [Sidenote: El Volador]