Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
attention to be disturbed by other series of thoughts.” from this perspec-
tive, the “technical exercises” of modern scientific drawing could do little to
improve one's ability to represent nature. Improvement could come only
from “intimacy with the things represented.” Scientific travelers were often
surprised to find that “savages” (
Wilde
) were often the better draftsmen.
Heim suggested that man's observational capacity had been corroded by
religion, which had “overstimulated the imagination.”
49
In his instructions
to earthquake observers, Heim urged an attentiveness that steered clear of
the modern extreme of nervous sensibility: “The sense organs should be
kept alert in the correct state of tension, without exciting them to a state
that would exaggerate sensations.”
50
Heim was hardly the first European to
have credited “primitives” with exceptional observational powers. Charles
Darwin had commented famously on the Tierra del fuegians' “more prac-
ticed habits of perception and keener senses, common to all men in a savage
state, as compared with those long civilized.”
51
Darwin saw no reason to
assume that a British scientist was a better observer of nature than a “sav-
age”—nor even, he might have added, than an insect or reptile endowed
with the capacity for mimicry. As we will see in the next chapter, this anthro-
pological perspective informed nineteenth-century debates about the ob-
servation of earthquakes. observers were often compared by race and even
species—snakes and catfish were considered particularly keen.
52
If scientists
might turn to “savages” for scientific drawings, why shouldn't geologists
turn to Swiss citizens for earthquake reports?
Heim maintained this capacious idea of seismological observation even
as other seismologists increasingly restricted their data to instrumental
traces. He had little faith in the objectivity of self-registering instruments.
53
As he argued to the International Seismological Association in 1909, “Above
all, a more precise observation of all earthquake phenomena is necessary,
in order to learn to understand them. one cannot say from the start,
how
they are to be observed. one must experiment, experience; and theoretical
perspectives and hypotheses can and will enrich observation.”
54
F. A. Forel: Earthquakes and Ecology
Heim was not the only scientist whose personality and politics shaped the
Earthquake Commission's outreach efforts. The Neuchâtel-based naturalist
f. A. forel is better known today as a founder of an early strain of ecology:
limnology, the study of the physical and organic conditions of mountain
lakes. Limnology stood as a critique of the modern splintering of scien-
tific expertise and the estrangement of scientists from those with practical
