Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
guarded against by art, the conditions will tell upon its character. “To the firm
ground of nature trusts the hand that builds for aye,” is true in a real as well
as in a metaphoric sense. This trust in a stable earth is a necessary element in
much that is noblest and most aspiring in the life of men. expose a people
to constant devastations from an overwhelming force, whether it be in the
form of an human enemy or a natural agent, and their state of mind becomes
unfavorable for the maintenance of a high civilization. The best conditions
of the state can only be secured when the laborer toils with the assurance that
his work will endure long after his own brief life is over.
Shaler, however, was no prophet of doom. He was a devout man with a
providential view of the American continent, a view he expounded in a
schoolbook that defined “the fitness of a country for civilized man” in
terms of natural conditions conducive to production and trade.
5
He firmly
believed in a human racial hierarchy determined by environmental con-
ditions. The young continent of north America was not destined to be a
“cradle of civilization,” as he saw demonstrated by the backwardness of the
native indians. For the right settlers, however, Shaler was sure that Califor-
nia would indeed be a golden land. He set out to convince the American
public that earthquakes would not stand in their way.
in a series of popular articles, Shaler reassured his readers that earth-
quakes were but a magnified form of normal geological activity. “The no-
tion that the ground is naturally steadfast is an error—an error which arises
from the incapacity of our senses to appreciate any but the most palpable
and, at the same time, most exceptional of its movements.” Recognizing the
inherent instability of the earth's crust required, in his analogy, a minor Co-
pernican revolution for geology—a shift of perspective akin to the discovery
of the heliocentric system. Ground movement was not only common, he ar-
gued, it was a necessary condition for organic life: “Were it not that the con-
tinents grow upward, from age to age, at a rate which compensates for their
erosion, there would be no lands fit for a theatre of life.” Shaler dispelled
the occult qualities of earthquakes by means of mechanical metaphors:
earthquakes were to be studied in terms of “the machinery which produces
them”; faults were “earthquake factories”; lava was driven “perhaps with a
greater impulse than that which propels the ball from a canon.”
6
There fol-
lowed the lesson that the proper response to earthquakes was not fear but
scientific study and solid engineering. “And when experience has taught
them the simple lessons which it is necessary to practise in order to obviate
a large portion of the dangers occurring from these convulsions, there is
no reason why this region, despite the frequent light shocks to which it is
