Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
In the course of this passage, sexual imagery—the trees “bending and groan-
ing” in Alexina's embrace—gives way to something more radical: a natural
world that calls on the young girl to abandon the conventions of femininity.
Her laughter expresses “courage,” not “hysteria,” and her attitude of “curios-
ity,” “naïve delight,” and “impersonal interest” marks her as an observer in
the tradition of Muir and James. What unites their earthquake accounts and
Atherton's is the “impersonal” quality of their attention, their “forgetfulness
of self”—that state of pure objectivity that Albert Heim described as charac-
teristic of near-death experiences.
The Report
“there was no hysteria, no signs of real terror or despair,” recalled Arnold
Genthe, who photographed San Franciscans gaping at the spectacle of the
fires.21
21
What to do with their testimony, however, was not immediately clear
to the experts who set out to investigate the earthquake—commissioned
by the state government and funded by the Carnegie Institution of Wash-
ington. “Many of these replies are rather questionable scientific evidence,”
the commission judged, “inasmuch as many of them were in response to a
leading and suggestive question, and very few of them have been subjected
to the clarifying process of cross-examination.”
22
the commission was de-
termined to distance its research as much as possible from the sensational
reporting of the press. Commission-member J. C. Branner explained: “the
picturesque and sensational features of earthquakes are abundant and en-
tertaining, but to the geologist these features have only a passing and acci-
dental interest. For example, if a chimney top, broken off by an earthquake,
should fall on a man in such a fashion as to go right over his head and leave
him standing unhurt in the flue, it would be a striking, and to the man a
very important, fact; but, from the geological point of view, its only impor-
tance would lie in the fact that the shock was severe enough to throw down
the chimney.”
23
Like Kant in 1755, Branner initially attempted to divide the
“geological” point of view from the human one.
Working with felt reports was a learning process for the commission
members, several of whom were new to seismology altogether. At first, they
found much of the testimony hard to believe. For instance, they doubted
widespread reports of “visible undulations of the ground.” By their esti-
mates, the velocity of seismic waves in the crust—approximately two to
three kilometers per second—was “so swift that they would scarcely be ob-
served visually.” Still, they found “considerable testimony, of a consistent and
