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We highlight the contributions of Dr. Paul Schaufelberger, who arrived to Costa Rica in 1929, contracted by the government, to teach geology at the Liceo de Costa Rica, Colegio Superior de Señoritas and Escuela Nacional de Agricultura. He was the director of the department of Geology and Mineralogy of the Centro Nacional de Agricultura located at San Pedro de Montes de Oca in what is now Ciudad Universitaria Rodrigo Facio. In his work Schaufelberger contributed scientific and disclosure papers about geology as known in his time. He wrote many papers that served as guidance for the lessons related to the subject of Geology in Costa Rica. He left the country in 1939 hired by the Federación de Cafetaleros de Colombia with the purpose of performing geologic field studies intended for the betterment of the Colombian coffee industry. Schaufelberger died in 1976 in Colombia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the research carried out by Eng. Luis Matamoros Sandoval, who in 1902 published in Costa Rica his investigations on seismology in an article entitled "El interior de la corteza terrestre: una nueva teoría sobre el origen de los temblores" (The interior of the Earth's crust: a new theory about the origin of earthquakes). In his work, Matamoros followed the Aristotelic current and mixed it with the hypothesis developed by the Spanish friar Benito Feijoo, who proposed electricity as the physical cause of intense earthquakes perceived over large regions. Matamoros justifies his results by the use of mathematics combined with fundamental physical principles, some which he had great difficulty to explain due in part to the use of criteria and basic concepts that were not supported by the traditional physical knowledge. Despite his conceptual errors, the value of his work resides in the fact that it was the first local formal scientific attempt to explain the origin of earthquakes, a process that even in the great scientific centers of the period was the source of continuous speculation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]