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office.” As a “practical example” Suess pointed to a seismic observatory in
Bohemia that was run by the Academy of Sciences “at no small cost.” this
observatory depended on the cooperation of the imperial finance ministry,
the railway ministry, the mining administration, and the Vienna Physical
institute. “i doubt that such an enterprise could be better carried out from
Strassburg, and that it would be possible at all without the many domestic
connections and sponsorships.”
35
Suess's critique of the iSA echoed in part the political discourse of decen-
tralization in the waning years of the habsburg monarchy. it also reflected
the years he had spent scaling icy peaks and scouring provincial archives in
search of clues to the seismic history of the eastern Alps. As he put it else-
where, macroseismology “demands very precise tectonic local knowledge,
does not permit of centralization, and seeks the causes of tectonic earth-
quakes on the dislocations themselves.” For microseismology, earthquakes
were merely “the incidental trigger of secondary phenomena, which are
soon diffused among other questions of geophysics.”
36
Characteristically,
Suess refused to sever the micro from the macro. he recommended against
Austria's joining the iSA.
Montessus and Suess were defending a humboldtian approach to sci-
entific internationalism against gerland's purifying impulse. in addition to
international cooperation, they argued for the value of local knowledge.
in addition to building observatories, they urged seismologists to strap on
their hiking boots and return to the field. And in addition to probing the
inorganic stuff of gerland's “earth science,” they called on seismology to
serve human welfare.
Man
gerland's elimination of humanity from the purview of geography has long
been misunderstood as an expression of positivism. he was accused by the
geographer hermann Wagner of being the kind of person who “despises all
anthropogeographic problems, because they are not capable of precise solu-
tion.”
37
in truth, gerland's motivations were more complex. Paradoxical as
it may seem, he was attempting to reinvent humanism for a scientific age.
gerland was, after all, a human scientist before he was a physical scien-
tist. Well before he took up the cause of seismology, he had won respect
for his anthropological scholarship on the relationship between
Kultur-
völker
and
Naturvölker
(civilized and primitive nations). in
Über das Ausster-
ben der Naturvölker
(On the extinction of the Primitive Races)
he argued
that colonized populations were not in fact doomed to extinction, and he
