Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
talk: for, in the first place, the common people do not accurately adapt
their thoughts to the objects; nor, secondly, do they accurately adapt their
words to their thoughts: they do not mean to lie; but, taking no pains to
be exact, they give you very false accounts. A great part of their language is
proverbial. If any thing rocks at all, they say it rocks like a cradle; and in
this way they go on.”
6
In this vein, the Calabrian earthquakes of 1783-84
typically figure as the first to have been described scientifically. Their impor-
tance—according to the most illustrious of nineteenth-century geologists,
Charles Lyell—“arises from the circumstance, that Calabria is the only spot
hitherto visited, both during and after the convulsions, by men possessing
sufficient leisure, zeal, and scientific information, to enable them to collect
and describe with accuracy the physical facts which throw light on geologi-
cal questions.”
7
Lyell made it seem self-evident that scientific descriptions
of earthquakes could come only from men of science.
What Girls Will Tell
others hoped to dispense with human witnesses entirely. Robert Mallet's
study of the neapolitan temblor of 1857, subtitled
First Principles of Obser-
vational Seismology,
is often cited as the founding work of empirical macro-
seismology.
8
Mallet, a British civil engineer, showed how cracks in masonry
and overturned objects could be used to infer the direction from which
seismic waves had propagated. He based his research almost exclusively on
architectural damage, and found little use for eyewitness testimony. Indeed,
Mallet complained to Lyell of the lazy neapolitan savants; he saw no reason
to believe their reports of nightly aftershocks, since he himself had slept just
fine.9
9
In Mallet's judgment, lay observers lacked the “observational tact and
largeness [
sic
] of a disciplined imagination and eye that are amongst the
accomplishments of the physical field-geologist.”10
10
He repeatedly insisted
that the untrained eye simply failed to see. In the past, earthquakes had
been studied in the absence of “any guiding hypothesis, of any distinct idea
of what an earthquake really is, of any notion of what facts might have been
of scientific importance to observe, and what were merely highly striking or
alarming . . . —in the want of all these, as well as of any calmness or unexag-
gerative [
sic
] observation during such alarming visitations, few facts of the
character and precision requisite to render them of value to science can be
collected with certainty. The true observation of earthquake phenomena is
yet to be commenced. . . . The staple of earthquake stories, in fact, consists
of gossip made up of the most unusual, violent or odd accidents that befell
men, animals, or structures, rather than of the phenomenon itself.”
11
