Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
allgemeine Bildung
), a feat of networking among existing institutions. Ac-
cording to Daum, Volger was “driven by a democratic impulse. Through the
fDH, [Volger] promised not only an improved exchange of information,
but also the opening of research and teaching institutes to the public.”
16
In keeping with his goal of making science accessible to the public, Volger
studiously avoided foreign terms in his publications. Nonetheless, he styled
himself as a researcher and scorned writers who viewed the world merely
as “material for penny-a-line articles.”
17
Indeed, in his own estimation, his
monograph on the Visp earthquake offered no reward to its publisher be-
yond the satisfaction of seeing his name on the title page. (In the event,
the publisher died before enjoying even that compensation.) While the
topic itself was no mere popularization, its methods and rhetoric conveyed
Volger's democratic vision for the sciences.
Volger thought he knew what caused earthquakes, and his theory was
not unrelated to his politics of knowledge. Earthquakes were caused by the
collapse of underground caves due to the inflow of water. He branded those
who insisted on volcanic causes with the eighteenth-century label “Pluto-
nist.” referring to a “Plutonic hierarchy,” Volger repeatedly characterized
Plutonism as a kind of elitist superstition. for instance, correlations between
earthquakes and volcanic eruptions amounted to
“downright mischief
with the temporal relations . . . to make 'the earthquake' look like a certain
ghostly something which has its seat beneath the earth's surface and capri-
ciously materializes first here, then there, in a way all too redolent of table-
turning and spirit-rapping.” He thus cast Plutonism as a highborn fallacy,
and this rhetorical strategy shaped the way he reported eyewitness observa-
tions. for instance, he discounted reports that the quake had opened cracks
in the earth or released thermal springs (potentially evidence for a Plutonist
account of lava surging from below), by attacking the character of the re-
porters. These were either “superstitious” and “pseudo-scientific” “travel-
ers” or sensationalistic journalists: “If the reports of travelers that have been
spread in the newspapers spoke of ruptures in the mountains, of cracks in
the ground, of the opening of the earth, of rivers of mud spewed from the
earth, and similar scenes of horror, then what this depiction revealed was
only the entirely amateur [
laienhafte
] viewpoint, defined by superstitious,
pseudoscientific prejudices.” Thus Volger embraced the testimony of eye-
witnesses whose ability to “appreciate these phenomena” may have derived
simply from their experience as locals, at the expense of the descriptions of
“travelers” who refused to admit their “lay” status. By stigmatizing travel-
ers' reports as both “superstitious” and “pseudo-scientific,” both preten-
