Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
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Geographies of Hazard
Among the first desires which seize a visitor in an earthquake country, is to experi-
ence a shaking.
—John Milne
1
Nineteenth-century europeans had a tendency to think of earthquakes as a
“tropical” phenomenon, characteristic of savage realms, where nature was
said to operate on a grander scale.
2
When the “scientific” historian Henry
Thomas Buckle set out to explain england's rise to the pinnacle of civiliza-
tion, he divided the influences of nature into two classes: those conditions
that appealed to rational understanding, and those that instead provoked
the “imagination.” foremost among the latter were earthquakes and volca-
noes, which thwarted every impulse to deduce the laws of nature:
Of those physical events which increase the insecurity of Man, earthquakes
are certainly among the most striking, in regard to the loss of life which they
cause, as also in regard to their sudden and unexpected occurrence. . . . The
terror which they inspire, excites the imagination even to a painful extent,
and, overbalancing the judgment, predisposes men to superstitious fancies.
And what is highly curious,
is, that repetition, so far from blunting such feelings,
strengthens them. . . .
The mind is thus constantly thrown into a timid and
anxious state; and men witnessing the most serious dangers, which they can
neither avoid nor understand, become impressed with a conviction of their
own inability, and of the poverty of their own resources. in exactly the same
proportion, the imagination is aroused, and a belief in supernatural interfer-
ence actively encouraged. Human power failing, superhuman power is called
