Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
of organizing information on a new scale, the commission decided to main-
tain two record topics, one in which each “Swiss” earthquake would be
entered and numbered in order of occurrence, with a reference to the fold-
ers where the relevant observations were stored, and one in which records
of past earthquakes would be collected “from the literature.”
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These topics
and folders would constitute the commission's archive, to be stored at the
Bern observatory. “All these documents are preserved in the archives of the
Commission,” wrote forel, “to be successively studied and compared.”
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In
this way, the data would remain open to reprocessing and reinterpretation.
forel demonstrated this principle by publishing his own analysis of the
1879 earthquake, the first recorded by the commission, while Heim was still
at work on his version. from the start, the commission recognized the need
to preserve and periodically reexamine the original observations, a guiding
principle of macroseismology today.
Somewhere along the way, however, the commission must have lost
sight of this intention, for its archive is nowhere to be found. All that re-
mains are two small sets of documents preserved in the personal papers of
two commission members. from these incomplete sources, we can none-
theless reconstruct something of the texture of communication between
scientists and lay observers. How did the network operate in practice? How
were volunteers recruited and their observations systematized?
We can begin to answer these questions on the basis of the notes of one
Christian Brügger of Chur (canton Graubünden), member of the commis-
sion since 1880. Brügger drew praise from the director früh as “an avid col-
lector of earthquake reports.”
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He was also one of the most active members
of his cantonal natural scientific society, where he lectured on earthquakes
among a host of other topics. According to his eulogist, Brügger was an
old-fashioned naturalist, “who with wide-open eyes liked best to ramble in
the open air and showed a lively interest for all the diverse manifestations
of the natural and of the human world.” He combed the hills and valleys
of Graubünden for studies of zoology and meteorology alongside his spe-
cialty, botany. He also mined libraries to compose histories of spas, forestry,
fishery, and dairying, and dug into local archives for a chronicle of natural
events that reached back to the year 1043. He was, in short, a local notable
and a fount of local knowledge—“the best connoisseur of our beautiful
Graubünden.”
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His work for the commission was motivated not by an in-
terest in seismology per se but by a commitment to local natural history.
Brügger was trained in plant geography, an important source of mod-
ern ecological thought. He was scathingly critical of the
Stubenbotaniker,
the
armchair botanist, and of the futile quest to classify plants on the basis of
