Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
lanches, and rock slides have been reported, as well as the ringing of church
bells and general panic of the inhabitants. Springs have been clouded, run
dry, or appeared in new places. The local formation of waves on lakes in the
absence of wind has repeatedly been observed.”
9
In an age before reliable
seismographs, such frequent sensible but not destructive seismic activity
furnished ideal specimens for naked-eye research.
10
1855: Volger's Democratic Example
on a wet and foggy day in late July 1855, the strongest Swiss earthquake of
the past three hundred years struck the Visp Valley in the canton of Valais
(Wallis). It was accompanied by “thunderous rumbling, stormy booming,
heaving whooshing, cracking, crashing, crackling, braying, whistling and
clanging . . . the mountains rocked up and down, countless rocks from all the
peaks and cliffs slipped and rolled, the walls of the houses tilted and fell over
in a heap of rubble, balconies broke, roofs slipped or collapsed.”
11
The shock
was felt through most of Switzerland and into neighboring parts of Ger-
many, france, and Italy, and aftershocks were reported into November.
12
At the time of the Visp earthquake, otto Volger was a
Privatdozent
(un-
salaried lecturer) in geology at the university of Zurich, having fled his na-
tive Saxony after participating in the failed revolution of 1848.
13
Apparently
unaware of the magnitude of the project he was undertaking, Volger began
collecting eyewitness reports of damage from the earthquake. In order to as-
sess the quake's more remote effects, he put in place the first nodes of what
grew into an extensive network of correspondents. Volger's evidence came
from “people with a great variety of educational backgrounds” [
Personen von
verschiedensten Bildung
].
14
During the three years he spent writing his monograph on the 1855
earthquake, Volger held a part-time teaching position at a natural scien-
tific society in frankfurt. It was in frankfurt that Volger became, according
to Andreas Daum, one of the German-speaking world's first semiprofes-
sional popularizers of science. Volger sought to popularize a stridently secu-
lar, cyclical view of geohistory, a challenge to biblical catastrophism. His
earthquake research came to serve this goal. As he explained, “The rocking
of the earth's surface does not announce the decline of the world, but rather
the rule of the eternal order of nature, which in transformation furnishes
the certain guarantee of its everlasting constancy.”
15
Volger also became ac-
tive as an organizer, working to counteract the growing specialization of the
sciences. In 1859 he founded the free German foundation for Science, Art,
and Public Education (
Freie Deutsche Hochstift für Wissenschaften, Künste und
