Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
from the dead weight of tradition and initiate them into the radical empiri-
cism of the Humboldtian traveler.
The Uneasy Earth
Until the victorian era, earthquakes had only been cataloged on a regional
basis. These were nonetheless painstaking feats, and one cataloger even
went blind in the process.
43
The work of soliciting observations required
the leisure to maintain a wide correspondence network and tended to be a
gentleman's pursuit. The first global catalog of earthquakes was assembled
by Karl von Hoff, a high-ranking official of the Duchy of Gotha in the Na-
poleonic era, and published in 1840, three years after his death. it included
2,225 earthquakes, from 1606 BCe (the eruption of Mount Sinai) to 1805.
44
Yet the most famous earthquake catalog of the nineteenth century was the
work of the french mathematician Alexis Perrey, who was denied the ad-
vantages of wealth and birth that would have eased his labors. The son of
a forest ranger, Perrey gave up plans for the priesthood in favor of a series
of modest academic posts, but he maintained monastic work habits. He
began to compile annual lists of global earthquakes in 1843; by 1850 he
was recording more than five hundred events per year. As Charles Davison
noted in his 1927 history of seismology, “Perrey's devotion to science was
so intense that his health began to suffer from the strain.”
45
Perrey retired
to Brittany in 1867 in order to recover, but he maintained his network and
continued to publish his lists each year.
Dismissing these earlier efforts, the British engineer Robert Mallet
claimed for himself the distinction of having made “the first attempt to
complete a catalogue that shall embrace all recorded earthquakes.” Not-
ing the sharp increase in the number of earthquakes recorded since 1700,
Mallet commended “the advance of human enterprise, travel, and obser-
vation.”
46
indeed, Mallet was quick to assume that his work represented
another victory in the British empire's scientific conquest of the globe—“of
the rise, progress, and extension of human knowledge and observational
energy, and also of the multiplication and migrations of the human fam-
ily and its progress in maritime power.”
47
What was indeed unprecedented
was the scale of his research into original historical sources. in all, he listed
6,831 earthquakes between 1606 BCe and 1842 (up to the beginning of
Perrey's annual lists). His 1858 seismic map of the world was “more than
a picture”; it was a faithful depiction of the “most formidable” seismic re-
gions of the earth.
48
Mallet began by grouping all known earthquakes into
three classes, “great,” “mean,” or “minor,” which he matched to three dif-
