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in North Andover and in Salem, Mass., and more curious still, the simulta-
neous shock on the Pic du Midi (Pyrenees), that was reported in 'Nature,'
point to some wide and deep movement, but lightly felt hereabouts at the
surface, and yet very likely to be stronger near some of the earth's great
safety-valves, like Iceland.”
18
Did rockwood know, Martin wondered,
whether any shaking had been felt at intermediary points like the Azores
and Newfoundland? rockwood did not, but that did not stop Martin from
printing his transcontinental speculations in
Science.
As John Milne noted,
“the probability, however, is that these coincidences are accidental.”
19
The Earthquake Collectors
Few young followers of the trans-Atlantic stamp-collecting craze of the
1870s were as fortunate as the sons of the mathematicians Alexis Perrey and
Charles rockwood, of Brittany and New Jersey, respectively. As the fathers
amassed reports on earthquakes from newspapers and independent observ-
ers around the world, the sons reaped the philatelic benefits of their cor-
respondence.
20
Perhaps the fathers shared something of the sons' Victorian
passion for collecting, and something of their thrill at epistolary contact
with distant lands.
Charles Greene rockwood came from a prominent New Jersey banking
family that had been in the United States since 1636. From 1877 to 1905
he was professor of mathematics at Princeton.
21
rockwood bequeathed the
Princeton archives three fat volumes of newspaper clippings on earthquakes.
these had formed the basis for his catalog of “American earthquakes,”
which covered North and South America and was published periodically in
the
American Journal of Science
from 1872 to 1886. When rockwood took
up this work, there was no central source for data on earthquakes occur-
ring in the United States. the heidelberg geologist Carl Fuchs, who began
publishing annual earthquake lists for europe in 1865, complained about
this lacuna in an 1880 letter to James Dana at Yale. “In my annual reports
the very small number of earthquakes in America
is particularly striking. It is to
be presumed that this is the result of lack of information on earthquakes
and not of an extraordinary scarcity of such events in your country. . . . I am
unfortunately ignorant as to whether any one in America is engaged in col-
lecting earthquake statistics nor do I know what are the sources from which
information can be obtained.”
22
Dana forwarded the letter to rockwood,
who sent copies of his “Notes” to Fuchs and brought Fuchs's publications
to the attention of American readers. Fuchs reciprocated with his list for
1877-78, but he noted its imperfections: “these can only rise to a degree
