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ceased. the second-hand was somewhere between 40 and 50 when I realized
this. I lost the position of the second-hand because of the difficulty in keep-
ing my feet, somewhere around the 20-second mark. I suppose I ought to say
that for twenty years I have timed every earthquake I have felt, and have a
record of the Charleston earthquake, made while the motion was still going
on. My custom is to sleep with my watch open, note-book open at the date,
and pencil ready—also a hand electric torch. these are laid out in regular
order—torch, watch, book, and pencil.
How then was McAdie to explain the fact that his reported time was about a
minute later than most? He continued: “However, there is one uncertainty; I
may have read my watch wrong. I have no reason to think I did; but I know
from experiment such things are possible.”
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training, precision, experimentation, and skepticism: McAdie underlined
the building blocks of his scientific attitude at this moment of crisis. He
held himself to a heroic ideal of earthquake observation. As we have seen,
it was an ideal with an illustrious heritage in the memoirs of Humboldt,
Darwin, and Muir. McAdie, a founding member of the Sierra Club, once
imagined what Muir would have said of a newly reported landslide in the
Pamirs: “We would have had a description, both accurate and eloquent, for
he would have written into it not only what the eye beheld, but much that
other men must have failed to note, because they failed to feel.” It was then
that McAdie recalled Muir's famous account of the earthquake at Yosemite:
“Mr. Muir often described the scene to the writer and fellow members of the
Sierra Club. It is plain that after the first two or three seconds of doubt and
trepidation, Muir realized what was happening and enthusiastically wel-
comed such an opportunity for close observation of the swaying trees, and
the piling up of the talus by the torrent of rocks from the cliffs, forming a
luminous bow as they fell. His intense interest and forgetfulness of self were
not assumed, but the natural expression of a spirit all eager to observe and
interpret, if he could, the shaking earth and allied phenomena.”
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Perhaps,
on that April morning when McAdie's home on Clay Street began to heave,
he conjured his friend Muir. At Yosemite, as McAdie pointed out, Muir “was
probably the one man in the valley who kept his head.”
McAdie's tribute to Muir implied that the act of earthquake observing
was not simply a matter of scientific discipline. Muir's attitude was “the nat-
ural expression” of his “spirit,” not a trained habit; it constituted a “forget-
fulness of self” that was “not assumed.” Perhaps these descriptions sound
familiar. they recall similar testimony, from men like erwin Baelz, Albert
Heim, and William James, of the peculiar objectivity of the human mind
