Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
to the mechanical problems, presented by the phenomena left after the
shock.” With his insistence on the “unerring certainty of deduction” and
the superior observational skill of “the physicist himself,” Mallet verged on
a caricature of the Victorian expert—the Sherlock Holmes of earthquakes.
And yet, to his own surprise, Mallet found that reports of sounds, despite
their ambiguities, “are not without their seismic significance.” Suddenly the
voices of the earthquake victims themselves intruded into his treatise. on
the periphery of the area in which sounds were audible, observers described
a “low, grating, heavy, sighing rush,” while those in the center reported
a rumbling or (here Mallet felt compelled to quote the original Italian),
“rombo, rumore di carozzo . . . fischio, sospiramente. . . . These descrip-
tions, aided by the expressive gesticulation and imitative powers of the nar-
rators, conveyed a far more exact notion of the sounds heard, and of the
relative times in which they were heard, than I can hope to transmit in writ-
ing. . . . They were collected in my progress . . . without much idea of their
leading to any very distinct or valuable conclusion. The result however now
appears to support the conclusions arrived at, from the rigid methods of
tracing the origin out from the wave-paths.”
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These rushes and rumblings,
then, only found a place in Mallet's treatise because they corroborated his
theory. Despite his “physicist's” instincts, Mallet reluctantly acknowledged
the force of the testimony of earthquake witnesses, full of meanings that
escaped translation.
A “Damned” Science
Despite the confidence of these new experts, the barriers to establishing seis-
mology as a professional science remained steep throughout the nineteenth
century. one problem was that there were no limits to the kinds of observa-
tions that might be relevant to earthquake research. According to theories
widely accepted in the nineteenth century, earthquakes might be triggered
by volcanoes, barometric fluctuations, atmospheric electricity, geomagnet-
ism, humidity, or the positions of celestial bodies. Analysis of the course
and impact of earthquakes required an even wider variety of data, from
the geological to the zoological and psychological. Geographically as well,
earthquakes presented no clear limits. Speculation was rife over the appar-
ent coincidence of earthquakes across vast distances, and the subterranean
channels that might account for such teleconnections. This uncertainty
about what constituted seismology's evidence brought the field into precari-
ous contact with such “pseudosciences” as astrology and spiritualism.
