Geoscience Reference
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only by railways but by stage-coaches; where the appearance of a gig or post-
chaise must have been an event signalizing a whole week; where two-thirds
of the people could speak no English; and which has not as yet been tossed
into importance by a single shock of an earthquake.”
3
the earthquake records begin in 1788. Initially, the tremors caused
“great alarm, especially one which occurred on a Sabbath while the congre-
gation was assembled.”
4
Later researchers note two oddities of the Comrie
earthquakes: the sheer number of slight tremors (an estimated eight to nine
hundred within six months) and the small area in which they were sensible
(no more than three miles away).
5
For the next thirteen years, these shocks
were patiently recorded by two local clergymen, one of whom earned the
moniker “Secretary to the Earthquakes.” But they attracted little interest be-
yond the village. then, for the first four decades of the nineteenth century,
the earth lay quietly beneath Comrie. At last, on 23 october 1839, Comrie
was the center of an earthquake felt across much of Scotland. “the conster-
nation was such that the people ran out of their houses, and, late as was the
hour, many assembled for prayer in the Secession Meeting-house, where re-
ligious exercises were continued until three in the morning”—during which
two further shocks were felt. Robert Chambers's
Edinburgh Journal
reported
that the shaking even burst a dam supplying water to factories in the neigh-
boring county of Stirlingshire.
6
this event finally stirred Comrie to action.
two locals began independently to collect observations: Peter Macfarlane,
the town's postmaster, and James Drummond, a cobbler. Macfarlane, also
known as a temperance leader, drew up a crude yet innovative scale to
weigh the strength of the shocks, setting the 23 october quake as a 10 and
rating subsequent ones relative to it.
7
It is estimated that he recorded three
hundred earthquakes in his thirty-six years as an observer.
8
Drummond, as
we'll see, was by far the more ambitious of the two men. He was described
by a neighbor after his death as a man with “much interest in antiquarian
lore,” whose “racy conversation” ranged across “Comrie earthquakes, Ro-
man invasions, and opinions of political men and measures.”
9
Meanwhile, the Comrie earthquake of 1839 drew distinguished men of
science to the humble village. the British Association for the Advancement
of Science initiated its own investigation, beginning with the formation of
an Earthquake Committee. In those years, the BAAS was still finding its
feet. Founded in a reformist, public-minded spirit in 1831, the association
was growing increasingly elitist. Its leaders were now at pains to police the
boundary between expert and popular knowledge.
10
Yet the chair of the
BAAS committee, David Milne (no relation to the later seismologist John
Milne) was not a professional man of science; he was an advocate at the
