Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
interests in the natural world. As forel wrote in his seminal treatise on
Lac
Léman,
the study of limnology forced the scholar “to transform himself suc-
cessively into a physicist, chemist, zoologist, botanist, archeologist, histo-
rian, economist.”
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on their own, none of these disciplines could come to
know a lake in the holistic manner of limnology. forel echoed the com-
prehensive vision of Alexander von Humboldt: “Geography has, in effect,
a noble ambition and a magnificent program: propelled by its definition, it
aspires to embrace in a vast generalization the ensemble of the sciences that
deal with the earth and its inhabitants, that is, all the human sciences. . . .
The description of the earth is not the enumeration and individual descrip-
tion of each of the categories of creatures and things that encounter each
other on our planet; it is rather the picture of the whole furnished by the
union of these diverse categories, by their relationships to each other, by
the reactions that they have to the environment in which they are immersed
and which they produce on this environment.”
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In its ambition to grasp a
holistic vision of living things in relation to each other and to their physical
environment, forel's limnology can rightly be termed ecological.
Limnology was also a practical endeavor, and forel addressed his study
in part to a lay audience, a “diversity of readers,” from ship captains and
fishermen to those who made their homes on the lake. All such individu-
als would profit from knowledge of the lake's life cycles and the conditions
that made it livable.
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forel wrote for “general readers,” for whose sake he
eschewed jargon: “rarely can an idea or act not be expressed in familiar
language. . . . If our beautiful science is not to become repulsive, we must
avoid deforming it with too many foreign words. We must beware of mak-
ing limnology incomprehensible to the many readers with an interest in
limnology by the use of foreign words.”
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By the time he penned these lines,
the ideal of communicating science in “familiar language” had also become
central to forel's work for the Earthquake Commission.
“Familiar Language”
Like Heim, forel presented the commission's work as an opportunity to
train citizens in a scientific mode of observation. reflecting on the obser-
vations collected in the network's first year, forel expressed guarded opti-
mism: “The value of these documents is very unequal, as one would expect;
some of them have all the characteristics of excellent scientific observations.
But if there are some that are less precise and exact, there are very few from
which there is absolutely nothing to be drawn. The general impression that
results from the study I have made is that the method adopted by our com-
