Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
To be sure, Wähner's ideal of objectivity did not exclude being an active and
critical editor of the testimony he collected. One witness reported: “A fear-
ful earthquake. A few houses have partially collapsed.” Wähner cautioned:
“This is exaggerated.” He omitted reports of churches being locked because
“people seem to be quick to lock churches in the interest of safety.” When
another witness claimed that a church steeple had been damaged, Wähner
cautioned, “no mention of this in the following report, thus to be consid-
ered incorrect.” In another case he inserted, “The remaining comments not
reprinted here prove to be somewhat exaggerated in view of the previous
account.”
14
In all these cases Wähner engaged with witness testimony in an
intimate and critical manner more typical of the human sciences than the
earth sciences.
As a native of northern Bohemia, Wähner depended on the Croatian col-
leagues with whom he traveled for translations. Yet he took pains to analyze
the word choices of his witnesses. For instance, when discussing reports of
earthquake sounds, he inserted the original Croatian next to German trans-
lations. He thus alerted his readers that the German
Getöse
corresponded
to Croatian
tutnjava.
15
In one case, he quoted an observer's seemingly awk-
ward description, “The dreadful
Getöse
[
tutnjava
] began to shake stronger
and stronger with the earth and the houses.” He commented, “Despite the
unusual manner of expression, very indicative of the character of the ground
motion.”
16
Wähner's conclusions reflected this attention to the observers' own de-
scriptive terms. In all the reports from the area of greatest destruction, he
noted, “we look . . . in vain for the mention of an instantaneous strong
movement such as would be termed, in everyday life as well as by a physi-
cist, an 'impact.' The ground motion was, to the contrary, generally perceived
as a long-lasting, continuous movement. . . . It seems to have been slower,
gentler movements, though movements of great intensity, than would have
resulted from a brief to-and-fro movement of the individual soil particles in
a horizontal or diagonal direction.”
17
Thus, in his final assessment of the na-
ture of the Zagreb earthquake, Wähner concluded that it took the form of a
transverse wave that shook the particles of the earth's crust nearly vertically,
and which spread out not from a central point but rather from an extended
area. In this way, by means of the language of “everyday life,” Wähner lent
support to suess's tectonic theory and discredited Mallet's claim that earth-
quakes are longitudinal waves that propagate radially.
Wähner's respect for vernacular language was not uncommon among
scientists in the Habsburg world. In contrast to Britain and Germany, where
a distinct class of scientific “popularizers” arose in the late nineteenth cen-
