Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
of completeness with respect to europe. From Austria, hungary, and a por-
tion of Germany I receive reports from the meteorological stations. In other
countries I have correspondents, who collect the earthquakes occurring in
their countries.”
23
Beyond europe, then, most of the information Fuchs re-
ceived came from newspapers.
rockwood too drew heavily on the American press, and local editors
were among his valued correspondents. A query to the
Boston
Post,
for in-
stance, received the reply that the tremor in question was not felt in Boston,
but that rockwood was “mistaken in supposing the center of New england
is always undisturbed. We had a nice little earthquake here about six years
ago, it seemed so pleasant that we have been longing for a repetition ever
since.”
24
A Connecticut newspaperman apologized to rockwood for being
unable to find an article he had written on an 1875 earthquake. “All I can
say today is that it was about two o'clock in the morning. Were I really a
scientific personage
, I should have had the matter recorded. At the time, peo-
ple here did not consider it an earthquake but merely the cracking of the
ground or ice, as it was very cold then. . . . I am quite sorry I can give you
no more information!”
25
Not all journalists proved reliable, however. rock-
wood was dismayed to discover that an evocative article on an earthquake
in Caracas, published in the
Atlantic Monthly
in 1883, could not be corrobo-
rated. A local naturalist replied to his inquiry: “the article in the Monthly
Atlantic for Mar[ch] [18]83 must be altogether a forgery, for there was
never
in the month of
September
an earthquake of such an energy in Caracas. . . . I
am really curious to see this piece of fiction, and will certainly do something
to warn people against that hD Warner whoever he may be. . . . the thing
is undoubtedly not pleasant for you; however it has some good: you shall
have henceforward [illegible] scientific notes on our earthquakes, small or
great, as I have established a Mallet seismometer which works allright. I
never sent anything to Perry [
sic
], nor to Fuchs, but I published a note on the
earthquake at Chio (1877) in
Nature.
”
26
By then, rockwood had decided
that newspaper reports of earthquakes required corroboration. From 1878
he marked “uncertain” those events “based upon
single
newspaper reports
and which could not be otherwise verified.”27
27
how rockwood organized these slips of newsprint was decisive. his
system was chronological rather than geographical. Clippings about earth-
quakes in Japan, Syria, Australia, england, Oregon, hawaii, and Nebraska
wound up side by side, all pasted to a single page. Such juxtapositions were
grist for speculation. What hidden mechanisms might link these far-flung
tremors? Journalists asked themselves the same question. the London
Times
suggested in 1824 that an earthquake in Comrie, Scotland, was linked to
