Abstract
The Perrey Archive, a unique historical collection of texts and manuscripts on earthquakes and volcanic eruptions of the past, is preserved in the Fondo Sismico of the library of the Società Napoletana di Storia Patria. This collection is the result of the tireless research of French scientist Alexis Perrey (1807–1882), who is regarded as one of the founders of seismology.
The article illustrates what it means to “collect” earthquakes and eruptions, as well as other extreme events and how Perrey built his collection over the course of roughly 40 years, and it describes the role that the catalogs created by Perrey played for historical seismology. Finally, in addition to the value and significance of Perrey’s intellectual enterprise for the history of science, the article discusses the different aspects of archives and archiving for sciences.
Graphical abstract
Photographic composition of some volumes from the Seismic Collection of the Società Napoletana di Storia Patria, photo by Claudio Novelli.
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Notes
“ To live and not work, not to deal with these dear earthquakes, is not to live.” Bibliothèque du Muséum d'Histoire naturelle, lettres d'Alexis Perrey adressées à Jean-Casimir Lemercier, 10 December 1854, (Ms 2675 / 124-135), 135v.
Napoleon wanted to transfer all possible archives to Paris, starting in 1809, to create a kind of archive of civilisations there (Donato 2019).
They are also useful today for dendrochronology, to determine when large paleoearthquakes altered the level of the land (Wald and Scharer).
Light Detection and Ranging: provides material data on an object and its distance.
It provides information related to the grain, texture, and orientation of the crystals and to the phase analysis.
Coordinates: 47.30797559105013, 5.050273126629304. The request to name a street after Perrey came from his nephew Henri Chabeuf, the son of his wife’s sister, whose husband was a notary, also mentioned in the registers of the Dijon Observatory (Chabeuf 1924, 3). Perrey is buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, but not mentioned among the famous residents of that place (Fig 2).
Jean Baptiste Guillaume Joseph Marie Anne Séraphin, Comte de Villèle (1773-1854): ultra-royalist French statesman. Minister of Finances in 1821 and Président du Conseil (Prime Minister) in 1822-28. Unpopular and beaten at the elections of 1827, he resigned in 1828.
With the thesis: Perrey, A. (1838). Théorie du mouvement d'un corps solide autour d'un point fixe. Douillier, Dijon.
Note that Guyton de Morveau served as Chancellor of the Academy from 1781 (Bret 2016).
This was the second scientific ascent of Mont Blanc after Horace-Benedict de Saussure’s famous one in 1786 (de Beer and Hey 1955). According to Slatter (1986, 150), Pierre Martel claimed that the summit of Mont Blanc was visible from Dijon. Martins (Martins 1865; 1866) was professor of natural history in Montpellier, director of the local botanical gardens, and corresponding member of the Institut de France. Flag Lieutenant August Bravais was professor of physics at the École polytechnique, a member of the Institut de France, and a former correspondent of Perrey’s (Gasser 1924, 156). August Lepileur was a physician.
Bibliothèque municipale de Dijon, Fonds de l'Observatoire de Dijon, shelf mark : Ms 3782.
Bibliothèque municipale de Dijon, Fonds de l'Observatoire de Dijon, shelf mark : Ms 3782, f. 9r.
Bibliothèque municipale de Dijon, Fonds de l'Observatoire de Dijon, shelf mark : Ms 3782, f. 5v
Bibliothèque municipale de Dijon, Fonds de l'Observatoire de Dijon, shelf mark : Ms 3782, f. 8v.
We know that Perrey took an interest in past earthquakes as early as 1841, but his idea of creating a collection can be traced back to his time at the Observatory. “M. Alexis Perrey, agrégé à la Faculté des Sciences de Dijon, annonce, dans une lettre adressée à M. Arago, qu'il s'occupe de recherches historiques sur les tremblements de terre. À la Lettre est joint un spécimen de ce travail, que l'auteur donne dans le but de provoquer des remarques sur le plan qu'il a suivi et qu'il modifierait au besoin. M. Perrey exprime le regret de n'avoir pas à sa disposition plusieurs grandes collections de chroniques, dans lesquelles il trouverait probablement enregistrés un bon nombre des faits dont il s'occupe. Cependant les sources qu'il a pu constituer jusqu'ici lui ont donné pour 13 siècles (de 306 à 1583) un nombre de 262 tremblements de terre qui, répartis les uns par mois et les autres par saisons, semblent déjà faire pressentir l'existence d'une inégalité dans le degré de fréquence de ces sortes de phénomènes aux différentes époques de l'année.” This is followed by a synoptic table (Perrey 1841).
"Phénomènes observés depuis le 1er Janvier
Et que j’ai connu par les journaux ou par correspondance particulière
A partir de ce jour, je change le plan de ce journal.
Le recto sera seul affecté aux observations que je ferai, le verso sera réservé à la description des phénomènes observés ailleurs et qui parviendront à ma connaissance.
Pour remplir ce cadre, je réserve ici 6 feuillets pour le 1er trimestre. Le nouveau plan commencera demain le 14 Avril." Bibliothèque municipale de Dijon, Fonds de l'Observatoire de Dijon, shelf mark : Ms 3782, f. 11r.
Bibliothèque municipale de Dijon, Fonds de l'Observatoire de Dijon, shelf mark: Ms 3782, f. 87v.
Bibliothèque municipale de Dijon, Fonds de l'Observatoire de Dijon, shelf mark: Ms 3782, f. 79v. This was the highest magnitude for the entire Tyrrhenian coast (Meletti et al. 2015).
A professor of geology in Pisa from 1841, he died two years after the earthquake while leading the battalion of students from Pisa University in the Battle of Curtatone during the First War of Italian Independence.
Bibliothèque municipale de Dijon, Fonds de l'Observatoire de Dijon, shelf mark: MS 3783, f. 37r.
Bibliothèque municipale de Dijon, Fonds de l'Observatoire de Dijon, shelf mark : MS 3784, f. 6r.
Perrey often cites the German geologist Bernhard von Cotta (1808-1879) as a source of information. Nature, September 15th, 1879, p. 505.
“But in both cases, financial matters have become entangled with matters of science and erudition, since in order to collect observations, Mr Alexis Perrey must engage in correspondence that requires not only significant time, but also more considerable expenses than one would initially expect. Comprehensive research on past centuries in turn requires correspondence, the transportation of documents, and even more or less expensive trips” (“Mais, dans les deux cas, une question financière vient se mêler aux questions de science et d'érudition, car, pour recueillir les observations, M. Alexis Perrey doit entretenir une correspondance qui n'exige pas seulement l'emploi de beaucoup de temps, mais encore des dépenses plus considérables qu'on ne serait tenté de le croire au premier abord. Les recherches relatives aux siècles passés exigeraient elles-mêmes, pour devenir complètes, des correspondances, des transports de documents, et même des voyages plus ou moins dispendieux”). Rapport sur les travaux de M. Alexis Perrey, relatifs aux tremblements de terre de Lioville, Lamé, Elie de Beaumont, Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l'Académie des sciences, 12 June 1854 : 1046.
Art. 298 (Greffe and Griset 2016, 94).
First Professor of Geology at the University of Zurich and at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). Alexis Perrey to Arnold Escher von der Linth, Dijon, 13.12.1845. ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Hs 4:1382 https://doi.org/10.7891/e-manuscripta-9043
Belgian astronomer Adolphe-Jacques-Lambert Quételet, director of the Royal Observatory in Brussels from 1828 until his death, perpetual secretary of the Belgian Academy of Sciences from 1834 (Galvani 1935). Quételet launched a kind of permanent enquiry into remarkable atmospheric and geophysical phenomena observed on the globe, which would appear to have inspired Perrey (Lancaster 1902, 452). On Perrey’s indebtedness to Quételet, see Davison (1927: 47-48).
“j’attribue cette pénurie des faites au manque de sources où j’aurais pu puiser”. Perrey to Escher von der Linth, Dijon, 13.12.1845. ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Hs 4:1382 https://doi.org/10.7891/e-manuscripta-9043 f. 1v.
« entreprise au-dessus de mes forces.” Biblioteca Moreniana, Carte Libri 35, Perrey to Libri, Dijon, February 1858, cc. 1r-2r: c. 2r.
Bruto Icilio Giuda Taddeo Libri Carrucci della Sommaja, Count of Bagnano, better known as Guglielmo Libri, a complex and controversial figure (Del Centina and Fiocca 2004, 3).
Let us think of the famous “Parisian manuscript” by the Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel, a manuscript later rediscovered in the Biblioteca Moreniana in 1952 (Del Centina and Fiocca 2004, XV). Libri was a real hunter of manuscripts on the history of science (Del Centina and Fiocca 2004, 14), which he absolutely adored (Del Centina and Fiocca 2004, 13, note 20).
He was tried in absentia and sentenced to ten years imprisonment on 22 July 1850 for the embezzlement of French books and manuscripts, but fled to London (Del Centina and Fiocca 2004, 18).
Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques des départements (Paris 1849).
“[d]ans une ville de province et loin des grandes centres scientifiques.” Biblioteca Moreniana, Carte Libri 35, Perrey to Libri, Dijon, February 1858, f. 1r.
“pourrait rendre un jour quelque service à la Science.” Biblioteca Moreniana, Carte Libri 35, Perrey to Libri, Dijon February 1858, f. 1r.
Lorient, Rue du port 78. Perrey’s daughter was born in December 1839 and died in 1918. In 1865 she married Paul Godron, a marine engineer who died in 1906. When their son-in-law was transferred to Paris as Inspector General, Mr and Mrs Perrey followed him. There their 13-year-old granddaughter died, followed soon after by Perrey himself (Chabeuf 1924, 3).
I am referring to the third one, published in 1865 and later as an excerpt.
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Biblioteca Moreniana, Carte Libri 35, Perrey to Libri, Dijon, February 1858
Bibliothèque municipale de Dijon, Fonds de l'Observatoire de Dijon, shelf mark : Ms 3782–3786
ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Hs 4:1382 https://doi.org/10.7891/e-manuscripta-9043 Alexis Perrey to Arnold Escher von der Linth, Dijon, 13.12.1845
Acknowledgments
The archival research that the author conducted in Naples for this paper was funded by the ERC project Early Modern Cosmology (Horizon 2020, GA 725883). The author also wishes to thank the Max Planck Partner Group The Water City (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, in collaboration with Ca’ Foscari University of Venice). The author is most grateful to the Rendiconti Lincei, and above to its editor-in-chief, Vincenzo Aquilanti, and the two referees, for dedicating special attention to the importance of historical seismological collections such as Perrey's in these days of great tension for the seismic swarm in the Phlegraean Fields. She also thanks Francesco Senatore for organising the conference and exhibition “Storici al lavoro. Zibaldoni, repertori, appunti, schede e altri strumenti della ricerca storica (secoli XIX-XX)” in November 2022, as this afforded her the opportunity to resume the research on Alexis Perrey she had begun in 2014. She also wishes to thank the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei for honouring her with an invitation, as this allowed her to put her research into written form. Finally, a note of deep gratitude to Paola Milone of the Library of the Società Napoletana di Storia Patria, for her uninterrupted assistance over the years when the author was in Naples, but especially when she was away, and to the Society’s President Renata De Lorenzo, for having “entrusted” her with Perrey and his story.
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Guerra, C. The Perrey Archive: a story about collecting earthquakes and eruptions. Rend. Fis. Acc. Lincei 34, 1115–1126 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12210-023-01205-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12210-023-01205-w