Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
humanism lay in the expectation that evolution would gradually loosen
natural constraints on human freedom. “But the higher man climbs, the
more he makes himself free of the coercive influence of the earth . . . thus
this ever growing freedom and independence is an invigorating and uplift-
ing outlook for the future that we are building for ourselves . . . and life does
not end with life on earth, for 'All that is transitory is but a metaphor.'”
44
Darwinian anthropology had spelled the end of the old humanism by cast-
ing man's intellectual efforts as no more than a struggle for existence. ger-
land was therefore on a quest for a new humanism, one in which even the
most earthly knowledge would serve a purpose higher than mere survival.
But his new humanism also introduced a radical elitism. By stigmatizing a
human perspective on nature as primitive, gerland's humanism abandoned
the hope of a convergence between expert and lay perceptions of nature. in
the words of george Sarton, founder of the history of science, only common
folk paid any attention to “mere earthquakes.”
45
History
in gerland's
Beiträge zur Geophysik
in 1900, Montessus de Ballore pressed
for “the most complete seismic description of the universe as possible.”
46
Montessus had already laid the foundations, having built a correspondence
network that furnished him with felt reports and instrumental data on tens
of thousands of seismic events. his library of seismic data eventually num-
bered approximately 170,000 events. At this scale, systematic organization
was of the essence. Seismology's age of newspaper clippings was over.
Montessus's solution embraced a technoscientific trend of the fin de siè-
cle: the
système de fiches
or card catalog, which, as he noted, “does such great
service in bibliography.” in preparing his global seismic geography, Montes-
sus divided the earth's surface into fifty major geographic regions and 451
seismic subregions. For each of the latter, he arranged index cards chro-
nologically with “all the necessary indications of time, place, sources, etc.,
the detailed history of every observed fact, which thus acquires a kind of
individuality.”
47
the discrete “fact” represented on each card often masked
the difficulty of deciding whether separate reports pointed to the same seis-
mic event. By 1907, these “facts” took up almost twenty-six meters of shelf
space. (their subsequent history is fascinating in its own right. Montessus
left the cards with the geographic Society in Paris upon his departure for
Chile in 1907. During the german occupation of Paris in World War two,
they were safely hidden in the vaults of the National Library. there they
were forgotten until the 1970s, when the fiftieth anniversary of Montessus's
