Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
tury, recent research suggests that Austrian scientists took it upon them-
selves to communicate with the general public. Wähner, for instance, was
praised for having “cultivated a popular writing style in the best sense.”
18
Rather than seeing this peculiarity as a mark of delayed modernization in
central europe, we might view it as a conscious attempt to bridge scientific
and vernacular discourses.
19
The ultimate goal of Wähner's investigation was “to unite the individual
observations, made and collected with the greatest objectivity, into a total
picture and to seek to discover the law that lies therein.”
20
As he wrote in the
introduction, “In my view, given the current state of the discipline, it cannot
be the task of a monograph on a large earthquake to investigate the final
telluric or even cosmic causes of [the event]. It will be necessary above all to
discern the phenomenon itself in its physical elements [
Elementen
], before
it can be permitted to discuss causes hidden from observation, and I have
convinced myself, that in this first area we still have a great deal to learn.”
21
Wähner's sense of his task thus rested on an implicit phenomenalism: to
identify the “physical elements” and unite them into a “total picture.”
Wähner's study of the Zagreb quake became a model of the monographic
method of earthquake investigation. But it also indicated the difficulty of
translating this method from its original,
landeskundlich
context, to a cultur-
ally diverse territory. As he acknowledged of his Croatian collaborators, “I
was greatly aided by their knowledge of the land and people.”
22
Nations and Regions
At first, Austrian seismology made little effort to overcome these barriers.
Instead, it developed as a patchwork of independent provincial networks. In
the early 1880s, geologists Rudolf Hoernes and Richard Canaval organized
lay seismic observers in the Austrian crown lands of styria and Carinthia,
respectively. They also began research on historical earthquake catalogs for
the two provinces. In these undertakings, both men were supported by local
institutions dedicated to
Landeskunde.
23
Hoernes anticipated objections to
conducting seismology as a form of
Landeskunde:
“One might criticize me
for undertaking first a discussion of a large area with political, that is more
or less artificial, borders, instead of beginning by publishing a catalog of
the earthquakes of the eastern Alps and then on the basis of the latter to
consider the seismically active areas and fault lines of the entire region.”
This was a typical quandary for the earth sciences in the Habsburg world:
whether to define the region of study according to physical or linguistic
borders. In response to his hypothetical critic, Hoernes noted that he had, in
