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Erdkunde as an autonomous scientific discipline, unified by its own meth-
ods and laws. “For only through such a conception will Erdkunde stop being
a vague field of miscellaneous knowledge, whose details, certainly valuable
in themselves, in this association all too easily—indeed almost of neces-
sity—lack a strictly scientific foundation; only through this conception, as
a dynamics of the earth as a whole, will Erdkunde become a strictly meth-
odologically unified science.” 15 gerland's rhetoric, with its stress on scien-
tific foundations, universality, dynamics, and methodological unity, was
intended to mark him as the long-awaited modernizer of geography.
in 1887, in the founding issue of his seminal journal Beiträge zur Geo-
physik (Contributions to geophysics), gerland firmly excluded human-
ity from the domain of geography. geography was strictly the science of
“the continuous mutual action between the interior and the surface of the
earth.” 16 gerland rejected both crass environmental determinism and an-
thropogeography's more sophisticated models of nature-culture interac-
tions. he argued, emphatically and controversially, that there was no way
to bridge the study of man as a product of external physical forces, on one
hand, and as an autonomous, conscious agent, on the other. explanation
could never run from human geography to physical geography; human ac-
tivity could modify the environment in limited ways but could never alter
the laws of nature. Since “inferences from the nature of the men to the na-
ture of the land are impossible,” a science of the human (if such could exist)
had nothing to teach the science of the earth. 17
in gerland's globalizing enterprise, the phenomenon of seismicity took
on “a remarkable position.” Seismicity seemed to him quite different from
planetary properties such as heat, elasticity, or magnetism, which could be
studied as independent subfields. Seismicity instead depended on the “mix-
ture, the aggregate conditions, the chemical-physical process in the earth's
interior”—of which, gerland noted, “we know almost nothing.” Volcanism,
to be sure, was also a composite phenomenon, but it was also “always a lo-
cal phenomenon.” Seismicity was a truly global property, “spread over and
through the entire earth, at least in the movements called forth by it.” 18 Seis-
mology's goal was nothing other than “the discovery of the fundamental
character and constitution of the earth” ( die Erkenntniss der Naturbeschaffen-
heit der Erde ). 19 And the study of the planetary interior was, in gerland's es-
timation, the geographer's raison d'être, the path to “a causal—not a merely
descriptive—earth science.” 20
the key to modern Erdkunde, in gerland's view, was the seismograph.
it was the telescope of the earth scientist, zooming in on the planet's
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