Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
of a golden age—and the patrician and bourgeois residents of the town
below. Neuchâtel prided itself on several institutions of learning—it was an
academic town, a
ville-école.
It was also home to a thriving community of
naturalists, which included Louis Agassiz before his departure for Harvard.
one might well expect the Neuchâtelois to go about observing earthquakes
much as they collected minerals or mollusks. Indeed, many of those active
in the Earthquake Commission also contributed as amateur naturalists to
local scientific societies. In the eyes of one unforgiving observer, “In Neu-
chatel everyone is a boarding-house owner, the town being characterized
by Protestant honesty, pedagogical pedantry, Prussian haughtiness, Dutch
cleanliness, catacomb-like tranquility, and pastoral stupidity.”
92
Materials from the Earthquake Commission are preserved in the papers
of the reporter for the region, the geologist Hans Schardt, and date from
1898 and 1907-10. Schardt was a specialist on the tectonics of the Alps and,
like Heim, a frequent consultant on engineering projects like the Simplon.
He was also active in local scientific societies, became president of the Neu-
châtel branch of the Swiss League for the Protection of Nature in 1910, and
compiled a glossary of the dialect of the Valais region.
93
His geology courses
at the university of Neuchâtel “were attended not only by students, but also
by adults eager to cultivate their minds, and by colleagues.”
94
In february 1909, Schardt received a nine-page letter from a boarding-
house dweller on the outskirts of Neuchâtel, in which was described, among
other things, sounds heard by one neighbor at half past two in the morning,
another neighbor's nightmare of crossing a collapsing bridge, and a distant
memory of a sudden storm of such violence that the writer had been thrown
from her bed, only to be mocked the next morning when she recounted the
experience to fellow lodgers. Two weeks later, the same writer reported to
Schardt further shocks that admittedly might have been “an effect of the
imagination.”
95
Schardt might have been forgiven for dismissing these let-
ters as the ranting of a lonely lunatic. Instead, he published them. In the
report of the Swiss Earthquake Commission for the year 1909, much of the
testimony of this lodger appears word for word, preserving even her meta-
phors and analogies.
96
What does this correspondence tell us about science
circa 1900?
one common feature of the reports Schardt received was the desire for
corroboration of an experience that many feared was a mere figment of
the imagination. In several cases, observers had not mentioned their sen-
sations to anyone until they saw Schardt's notice in the local paper. They
“feared having perhaps had a bad dream”; “I don't know if other people will
have noticed something.” “I am sure that I then rose to go put on my hat
