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he pursued both in libraries and across the Central American landscape
from Tehuantepec to Panama.
52
in the course of his research in Latin Amer-
ica and his correspondence with naturalists around the world, Montessus
gathered a vast collection of popular ideas about earthquakes—the basis of
the ethnography published, with his brother's oversight, after his death. At
face value,
Montessus's collection of seismic myths was an attempt to dis-
credit the
sciences travesties
(pseudosciences) and thus “extirpate” the residue
of the savage mind from modern science. Theories linking earthquakes to
weather, for example, were said to be the result of “folklore indefinitely sur-
viving in science.” “There exists in seismology a series of opinions, or even
of theories, that the efforts of the modern science of earthquakes has not yet
succeeded in extirpating from the preoccupations of scholars. . . . Here we
collide with the extreme difficulty of logically classifying this crowd of inco-
herent beliefs that originate in the depths of the thought of primitive man
or of the savage, and which, for more highly evolved man, emerge from the
mythology and religion of each people.”
53
indeed, the value of his anthol-
ogy was said to lie in its demonstration of the enduring “unity of the hu-
man mind.” Moreover, Montessus refused to include one source of legends
in his ethnography: the Bible. He insisted that its stories did not admit of
naturalistic explanation. To interpret biblical stories alongside pagan myths
(as eduard Suess did in
The Face of the Earth
) was to fall into an error that de-
rived “either from the non-observance of [science's] own rules, or from the
hubris of man to want to explain what is not capable of being explained.”
54
Despite himself, Montessus blurred the lines between european science and
religion, on one hand, and “savage” views of earthquakes, on the other.
Meanwhile, in Japan, the seismologist John Milne was “compelled to
wade [through]” traditional Japanese writings on earthquakes (in transla-
tion), as he searched for “facts of scientific importance.”
55
Milne, a mining
engineer, arrived at the imperial College of engineering in Tokyo in 1876
and took up research on earthquakes soon after. He expected to return home
to Scotland before long, assuming that the Japanese would take over his
research and seismology's “foreign element” would “die out.”
56
Like many
europeans, Milne was uncertain about Japan's status as a “civilized” nation.
As Gregory Clancey has shown, seismology and antiseismic engineering of-
fered the Japanese opportunities to surpass european science, and to do
so on their own terms. Many of the characteristics of nineteenth-century
seismology—its emphasis on empirical research over theorizing, its reliance
on untrained observers, its lack of professionalization—made it accessible
to east Asians at a time when Asia was still perceived as backward in West-
ern eyes.
57
Seismology's ill-defined boundaries allowed both Japanese and
