My experiments with volcanoes

by Thomas Augustus Jaggar

PREFACE

This, my latest book, is another experiment. After sixty years of volcanoes I have learned reversal of preconceived notions. Gradually I have learned a totally different approach.

Shaler of Harvard was my inspirer, worker in the wonders of swamp and ice and sea beaches. He set me to work and turned me loose; among books and storm waves and men; especially among men, young men, ever reaping something new. When I chose volcanoes for my field Shaler said, “You have certainly selected the hardest.” It was a missionary field, for in it people were being killed. But the products of internal earth fluids, lava sea bottom, and vast Canadian ancient meltings, seemed to promise real natural history. Volcanoes squirt up the very ancient stuff of the solar system. Therein, I knew, must be something for future discovery. The investigation of it was a clear field, if action was the goal.

My field education in geology was by Hague, the friend of Archibald Geikie. By Emmons, skilled in ore deposits, and like Hague, trained by Clarence King. By Bailey Willis, son of a poet, a superlative draftsman and field man, and a brilliant experimenter. I went into the American West with these men.

But this story of a volcano experimenter’s life would have reached nowhere without Frank Alvord Perret, whom I first met on the slope of Vesuvius in 1906. I knew at once that he was the world’s greatest volcanologist. His skill was taking pictures. Mine was making experiments. We agreed that these two skills in action would accomplish what theories never could approach.

Perret was an inventor. He was an artist. He was a poet. He was a lover of little children, and a worshiper of the music of the stars. Always in delicate health, he circled the world. I was with him on Sakurajima, on Kilauea, and on Montserrat. We did not agree. He had a vast love of the romantic and bizarre. I was always a sceptic. But I thank Heaven that his posthumous and nobly illustrated book reached magnificent publication. His other books set a standard for all time for what the field science of volcanoes shall be.

Perret and his camera were my models. He gave me all of his pictures to use as I chose, and he and Tempest Anderson taught me volcano photography. The latter, a Yorkshireman, was a British geographer and we met on many volcanoes.

The purpose of this book is to tell what one man saw. I was actuated by the will to learn. I wanted to copy ripplemarks on the bottom of the sea, to understand what force pushed up Harney Peak as coarse granite in the Black Hills, and to imitate Yellowstone geysers spouting rhythmically. I wanted to know how cracks made the Cascade Mountains pile up in a line.

Finally, I studied the San Francisco earthquake rift, sliding open parallel to the shore for hundreds of miles. How thick was the crust of the globe? Then I was called to Hawaii, islands on a ridge 1,700 miles long with volcanoes at one end, coral atolls at the other. And I started a volcano experiment station at a very lucky time. Volcanoes proved surprisingly amenable to experiment.

Forty years of this lead far away from Lyell’s geology—the geology of uniform processes past and present—and from brachiopods and trilobites. It lead to the ancestor of volcanoes. It lead to ancestral gas. It lead back 10 billion years. A lava splash might be a live souvenir of that age. More than anything else, this belief pointed our instruments down, to the inside of the globe.

Six decades of a man’s life. Decades of geology, exploration, foundation, outspreading, prediction, and fruition. The fact of fruition makes the telling worth while. Geological education was unbelief. Fruition was belief, verified by growth of unified science. Culmination was not geology but science. Uniformity, evolution, and symmetry are in nature. Value and number are human. I have been called geologist and seismologist, volcanologist and geophysicist. I am none of these. I am interested in the evolution of what Hoyle calls “This quite incredible universe.” I am just as interested in Bergson’s “Creative evolution” as in Hoyle and Lyttleton’s “New cosmology.” And more interested in life than in either. The elements of fruition are a thick earth crust, a comparable pattern for earth and moon, and a mechanism for earth core. This is the story of sixty years of volcaneering.

---

My Experiments With

Volcanoes

Chapter I
Young Scientist

“The gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone.”

It was the training of my youth under a father who loved God’s out-of-doors that led me to Audubon’s birds; to tramping miles over carries in Maine, Labrador, and Nova Scotia; and to fishing with another eight year old, named Willie Grant.

When I was fourteen my father the Reverend Thomas Augustus Jaggar, took our family to Europe, where botany and bird life were as much a part of my education as geography, French, and Italian. And it was during our visit in Italy that I made my first trip up Vesuvius. All of these early interests convinced me that I wanted to be a naturalist.

It was Nathaniel Shaler at Harvard who told me to go and study the beaches at Lynn and Nahant. So I walked and photographed, and measured ripplemarks. I found a headland and a longshore accumulation with scallops dwindling regularly along the high-tide level. I found swash marks a foot across forming as the tide went out. On the dunes were other sand waves beautifully regular.

Try it. Lie on your stomach and watch them. They are at right angles to the wind. Smooth them out and see what the wind does. It piles little flocculent heaps of course grains, each with an eddy downwind. The fine stuff migrates up the slopes forward with the wind, backward on the leeward side. The powder streams meet and lengthen the hills right and left.

I watched the swash marks. The swash of the surf full of sand rushed up the beach, cleared suddenly, and retreated, leaving a ridge along the beach. This elevation became the tide limit, and a new series started lower down. The swashes couldn’t climb over the ridge because the tide was going out. And so for hours ridge after ridge was built.

I watched high-tide scallops, six feet apart, forming heaps at the top of the beach. The swash waves ran into the bays between the heaps during the flood hours, making a rush up and a suck down. The rush up was muddy, the suck down was clear. Pebbles and sand were building up on the sides of the small promontories. Each heap was horseshoe-shaped, with the toe seaward. Forty or fifty crescents got smaller and more sandy toward the middle of the beach. Here was rhythmic force making repetition. The ripples and swash marks were repeated seaward. Clearly the headland of rock was making pebbles and sand, sending pulsations along the beach, instead of across it.

The ripplemarks were packed sand of the low-tide flat, formed totally under water parallel to the waves. The back-and-forth motion of waves made a pattern of sweep and eddy on the bottom. Were beaches, then, things of habit like birds? Here were four kinds of sand waves, all on one beach, all of them complicated by wind and water and tide; big and little; shapely and regular. The beach was alive. It was building from the end, it was rippling under wave action. It fed the wind as it dried, and the wind made an exquisite dune pattern of the grains. Perhaps beaches might be natural history, just as much as the birds that inspired my interest in nature when I was eight years old.

The mystery of the beaches drove me to a new discovery; to the university library, where I found French and English references to ripplemarks. I found experiments, soundings, fossil sandstone ripples. I learned that such great authors as the botanist De Candolle and Sir George Darwin had interested themselves profoundly in what happened to the sand grains. From the library I went to mud puddles in a tank and to experimentation. Thus I found my way from beach to books and from books to the making of baby beaches.

Later, at Harvard, zoology and botany were all cells and embryos and the microscope. The habits of animals scarcely entered into our studies. The natural history of Audubon and my boyhood had vanished. The new words were phylogeny and cytology, development of the individual, and cell development.

So in mineralogy the microscope and the tiny crystal governed; the molecules of the crystal, and the chemical atoms of the molecule. Science was headed toward the infinitely little, though later, by way of the spectroscope, it was to leap to the infinitely big of the heavens. I never learned to think the universe finite.

Professor Shaler wrote in 1893, “In the next century there will be a state of science in which the unknown will be conceived as peopled with powers whose existence is justly and necessarily inferred from the knowledge which has been obtained from their manifestations. In other words, it seems to me that the naturalist is most likely to approach the position of the philosophical theologian by paths which at first seemed to lie far apart from his domain.” Just this has happened in the world of galaxies and electrons, producing Einstein and Planck, Jeans and Eddington, Hubble and Hoyle. And I suspect that sea bottoms and volcanoes are “peopled with powers” yet to be inferred.

Through Josiah Cooke and his wonders of projection apparatus; through Cook’s nephew Oliver Huntington and his mineral crystals; through John Eliot Wolff, whose assistant in optical microscopy I became; through Robert Jackson with his museum collection technique and the hexagon plates on fossil sea urchins; through all these I was introduced to the laboratory collections and instruments. I found a fascinating world.

The theater, too, furthered my education. Like many Harvard students, I “suped” for several great actors and actresses, among them Julia Marlowe and Sarah Bernhardt. And in one play I even had a speaking part: “My lord, Posthumus is without.” I also practiced legerdemain as amateur assistant to Kellar and Hermann, who called me out of the audience and pulled rabbits out of my coat and eggs out of my mouth. Thus I learned of the psychology of audiences, how to experiment in public, and how easily deluded is the average mind. Just so nature may delude, if the scientist doesn’t keep his wits about him. But I also learned the value of vivid demonstration before students. A great exponent of this method of teaching is Professor Hubert Alyea of Princeton. His chemical experimentation is marvellous. His chemistry textbook is modern physical chemistry at its best. He demonstrates that the art of the magician has come down to the twentieth century and that even mathematical science may pass over to the layman. I suspect that geophysics does not need to be buried under differential equations as it is today. Certainly experimental volcanology made exciting at the lecture table could work wonders in getting the globe explored.

At Harvard we were taught that geology was a detective history. Vaguely, the same fossils were the same age. Vaguely, man had come from a fish which climbed up on the land. It was much later that radio activity of rocks was accepted as setting ages in millions of years. King and Kelvin taught us that the age of the earth was 24 million years and the sun was dying. A half century later, 2,000 million years was the figure and the sun was heating up. Now cosmogonists talk easily of 10,000 million years as an item in star history. I have learned that one can have any theory he chooses, and that some new discovery will probably reverse it. A discovery is the uncovering of an appealing, bright idea.

The idea of geology as history based on Darwin’s evolution never took root in my consciousness. Geology to me is the science of the globe. Science studies how things work, how things change, how they accomplish what they do, how they grow, and how they compare. It does not study the “why,” or the necessity for an origin of anything. Originating is eternally in progress. Astronomy today is giving up origins. History based on a few relics seems futile. Relics, or specimens, must be compared with action.

Guessing that we must have come from a fish, with no evolution sequence in successive strata and no mammals whatever in very ancient strata and no preservation of soft creatures possible, seems a contradiction of Darwin’s own testimony. He insisted on “the imperfection of the geological record.” But he had no conception that the Cambrian was 500 million years B.C., nor that the fiery Keewatin of Lake Superior was 1,800 million years B.C. Darwin knew that the bivalve brachiopod Lingula, now alive in quiet seas, is exactly the same today as it was then.

Lingula is found fossilized in the intermediate geologic eras. We have no proof that intelligent beings in ships from unknown lands did not dredge him up in Cambrian time. Five hundred million years is so absurdly long that there may have been at least twenty different flowerings of intelligence on the earth, having no relation to us. Continents are places of catastrophe. Sea bottoms are places of constancy. Man lives on continents, and his fossilized bones are short-lived.

If each Adam preceded a new humankind of 100,000 years, the time since the Cambrian allows for 5,000 deluges, or eruptive conflagrations. Each one would exterminate that particular Adam’s descendants. If glacial periods are deluges, we know their scratched boulders back to 400 million years before Lingula. These older ice sheets were in Canada. But we know fiery floods of lava 1,300 million years before Lingula, on the north shore of Lake Superior.

We have not one particle of evidence that before the race was killed off primordial volcanologists, who were very queer looking chaps, might have studied those eruptions with expensive instruments. Certainly they had a lot of copper at their disposal. Perhaps the great lakes were a continental sea, and some ancestor of Lingula was scooped up for food by those doomed beings.

But geology at Harvard was not all history. When R. A. Daly and I were graduate students, we worked on Ascutney Mountain, studying ancient fire-made granites. The hills were lumps of the ancient pastes crystallized. The crystals were feldspars, mica, quartz, and iron oxides. Oldest prisms were lime phosphate, the mineral apatite containing imprisoned brown glass. How did the several kinds of red hot paste invade the altered sedimentary slates? Was brown glass the ancestor? Lava is brown glass. Some of the phosphate crystals contain gas bubbles and liquids. Daly, who published the work, found that ancient lava pushed up while deep in the claystones, and shattered a hole by heat and cracking. The pieces sank and the paste or gas foam was injected in successive lumps. Each new lump had more silica.

Apparently the fragments melted—some of the old sediments of Lower Silurian age were silica—and the invading magma was contaminated with more and more molten sand. So basalt turned into granite. Thus Ascutney Mountain in Vermont became a classic place for hot fluids squirting up and recrystallizing the under rock of New England. It made eventually, by erosion, the Connecticut River landscape.

Daly became a specialist on granites, I became a specialist on lavas. We became professors at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Something new came into world geology when Wheeler, Hayden, King, Powell, Gilbert, and Dutton surveyed the Utah block fault mountains and the Rockies. They revealed the globe with a crust of gigantic cracked deep prisms, and an eroding surface. Davis of Harvard, the physical geographer, was at his zenith, and from Powell’s and Gilbert’s example came his classified river valleys. He devised systems of splendid topographic maps and models, and demonstrations of glacier steam beds and deltas. He made surface wear and dumping debris a living thing, and the land forms a record of it.

Thus I was overjoyed when, in 1893, I received the summons to go with Arnold Hague to the land of geysers, colorful canyon, old volcanoes, and the source rivers of the Mississippi. My job was to take pictures with a huge camera, but I posed as microscope man, too. I climbed the highest peaks of the Absaroka Range, and I traveled with Hague and a mule packtrain back and forth across the range, collecting specimens. Hague had been with Clarence King during the 40th Parallel Survey for the Union Pacific railroads.

Hague’s field method was to climb a peak, study the view, and ponder the visible strata, dikes, valleys, escarpments, and pinnacles for miles around, thus formulating each problem. Then we moved camp to a new place to solve the problem.

We sought the ancient craters. The volcanic tuffs and agglomerates covered thousands of square miles, dating from 30 million years ago and continuing outpourings until 2 million years ago, and there were lava flows, ropy or bouldery. Here were petrified trees; there could be found fossil leaves. The tree species told the formation ages of Tertiary time. Many peaks appeared but no volcano cones. The craters had been over what now were eroded dikes, or fissure fillings of lava, which stood out in crisscrossing walls. Where they clustered, ores were found: the Sunlight, Crandall Creek, and Stinking Water mining claims. These were the roots of lost volcanoes, lost by decay, tumble, rainfall, glaciers, and rivers. Underneath the mountainous lavas, appeared white marine limestone cliffs, and still lower appeared ancient granite gneiss.

The geology of ancient seabeds, fossils, eruptions, and glaciers was painted on a whole panorama of mountains and river basins. From a mountain top silently gazing through field glasses—which he was always losing and recovering—Hague would look around for hours. “That ledge is the Madison limestone, those are the Red Beds, those pink, rounded hills are Archean granites.”

After a day of packtrain travel I was free to fish or hunt. It was a privilege to hunt with Anderson, the old negro cook, whose gray beard and bushy white wool belied his keen eyes. He had been a slave, later a soldier in General Custer’s Big Horn expedition, and a pioneer and hunter. His father had been massacred by Indians, and Anderson swore he would kill any Indian on sight.

One of our hunting trips near Crandall Creek was especially memorable. “Mr. Jaggar, I smell sheep up on that shelf!”, said Anderson. And he climbed up a pine tree growing at the bottom against the limestone cliff. He laid his Winchester rifle on top of the steep slide rock slope at the foot of the tree, muzzle upward, butt end downhill. “You mind my gun, I’ll climb out on a limb against the cliff and get on the shelf, and yo’ all hand the gun up to me.” He reached the shelf, made of Cambrian limestone of trilobite fame, and sitting over on it immediately knocked down slabs of rock. They fell on the gun which started to slide down the slope. I grabbed for the muzzle pointed toward my throat, the stock wiggling right and left. The gun went off and I felt a nick in my ankle. Anderson had left a cartridge in the barrel with the hammer resting on it, but my nick was made by a pebble ploughed up by the bullet. So the trilobites took a shot at me. “Well, this is natural history,” I murmured. Old Anderson was less philosophical. He cussed me for letting the rifle kick itself far down among the trees.

Elk, grouse, blacktail deer, antelope, rattlesnakes, prairie dogs, skunks, badgers, owls, whistling martens, wild sheep, and the grizzlies we never saw alive were all part of the great West. So were the bucking cayuses and kicking mules with which we lived, numerous ranchers, prospectors, soldiers, sportsmen, and guides. Once we were joined by a sheriff looking for an escaped desperado from Red Lodge Prison.

Just before I left the Yellowstone, I visited the hot springs and geysers. With more than 4,000 vents, the geyser basins are steaming areas in the forest. At Mammoth, the carbonate terraces show exquisite ripples and sculptured cups in steps. One hotter group of waters, through the igneous lavas and granites, becomes full of silica and deposits sinter. The other, through limestones, deposits travertine. The alkaline siliceous waters deposit such strong silica edifices as to hold the explosive steam boilers of the geysers. Both silica and lime deposits are led to gorgeous sculpturing and to brilliant colors at their borders caused by the blue-green algae, which live at temperatures up to 150° Fahrenheit.

The boiling waters have been superheated volcanically since Tertiary volcano times, when first dark magnesian, and afterwards siliceous, lavas were ejected. Here is the same order Daly and I found in Vermont; the dark rocks first, rifting through slate, the granites last, with quartz cutting the dark rocks. The cavities among the Yellowstone geysers show quartz.

The surprise to me was that the geyser basins were eternally breaking down, cracking, dissolving, making new geysers in the forest. Instead of being chiefly deposition, the hot spring action is chiefly erosion. It is a vast cycle of hot magma gases and rainwaters from Tertiary times to now; from 20 million years ago to now. A long time.

Remember that the last retreat of the glacier-period ice was only 20,000 years ago. That ice found the geyser basins in full swing. A thousand times farther back were the Yellowstone volcanoes in full activity, and they kept going while the continent lifted and pushed the Gulf of Mexico from the Great Plains to where it is now. And yet that 20 million years was only a twenty-fifth of the time back to the trilobites, and a Yellowstone seabottom bed of that age is under all the lavas. Our schoolbook history is pretty small.

In all directions the ground of Norris Geyser Basin is cracking and changing. The geysers are utterly unreliable, here today and mere hot springs or empty cracks tomorrow. Old Faithful intervals range from thirty-eight to eighty-one minutes, quite irregular. The New Crater was a squirting, scalding jet which killed the trees and vegetation all about. Its seemingly regular, twenty-five foot jets shot up at forty-five degrees inclination about every three minutes. Later, in 1922, I was to find this geyser totally different. Careful studies have shown that water of this elevation boils at 199° Fahrenheit; one geyser gave off 253° Fahrenheit, or fifty-four degrees of superheat, seventy-two feet down its shaft. This is the only place of superheated waters known on earth. The roaring steam of the Black Growler has eighty-one degrees of superheat. The quantity of carbon, sulfur, and chlorine in the waters is so excessive, though it is very small in the rock, that a source of heat from volcanic gas is certain.

The net result is thousands of boiling springs of rainwater, soaking a sponge of rhyolite rock over hundreds of square miles, erupting over a remnant volcanic furnace beneath, and eroding and dissolving out basins at the headwaters of the Mississippi.

Here is an object lesson in volcanic erosion. Here is a perpetual eruption of volcanic gases which has dwindled after millions of years of melting siliceous and carbonaceous rocks. It recrystallizes them as andesites, rhyolites, and obsidians, and mixes deep steam with rainwater to do the work of erosion and water solution and of deposits, over a vent at the heart of the Rocky Mountains. As usual, this vent has cluttered itself from age to age with the melt of the deep earth crust, namely basalt, which Yellowstone’s lavas show repeatedly from bottom to top of its accumulations. And as usual, the vents themselves are hard to recognize, buried as they are under heapings.

In 1897 I returned to the Yellowstone, where I visited Death Gulch, a dismal solfataric gully with a trickle of cold, acid water near Cache Creek. Accompanied by Dr. F. P. King, I climbed up this gorge, where there was a bad smell and burning oppression of the lungs from hydrogen sulfide. It was a V-shaped trench 50 feet deep in volcanic puddingstones, whitened with alum and epsom salts. Bubbles rose through the water in many places.

The remains of eight big bears were found in the gorge, clustered in one place. The latest victim was a young grizzly with a clot of blood staining his nostrils from his last hemorrhage. Poison gas had killed him. Earlier visitors had found squirrels, hares, and butterflies and other insects killed by gas. Probably both sulfuretted hydrogen and carbonic acid gas do murder in still weather. However, we had the wind blowing up the gulch. We lit matches in hollows and carbon dioxide did not extinguish them. The same thing had happened when Mr. Weed in 1888 tested for carbon dioxide at Death Gulch.

Now, knowing the case of Mr. Clive, the Englishman, and his guide, Wylie, who were overwhelmed by hydrogen sulfide while photographing Boiling Lake on December 10, 1901, it looks to me as though the rotten-egg smell may play a large part in the killings at Death Gulch, as well as in some poison tragedies of Java. Boiling Lake is at the south end of Dominica Island north of Martinique. There are four solfataras and the scalding lake, the latter near the interior village of Laudat, at the head of a volcanic valley, and four miles on horseback from Roseau, a shore town southwest. When Mr. Clive, Wylie, and Matson—another native guide—looked down at the hot pool, Matson noticed it boiling without vapor, and called attention to the danger. However, they went on to the lake. Matson later reported, “I inhaled something offensive and felt as if I was dying. I ran, and lost consciousness. I came to in a ravine and found Wylie lying where I had left him.” Clive, refusing to leave Wylie, sent Matson for help, but when rescue parties arrived, both men were dead.

At Boiling Lake there was no eruption, no vapor, only the very bad smell. All the symptoms indicated a sudden change in the pool from steam to excessive hydrogen sulfide. And five months later, at Pelée across the channel from Dominica, excessive hydrogen sulfide set off the great explosions.

In view of these phenomena it seems likely that Death Gulch in the Yellowstone also kills with sulfur gas, the odor of which is so strong there. Day and Allen associate hydrogen sulfide with the limited Yellowstone sulfate areas, of small water discharged, and such is Death Gulch. One part hydrogen sulfide in 200 parts of air is fatal to mammals, and it may come up in gushes. Carbonic acid asphyxiates, but it is not a poison and when it is free is so heavy as to mix with air very little. Death Gulch is not a place of lime deposition like Mammoth Hot Springs, where carbonated water decomposes underlying limestone.

Europe was to be the next step in my education. As assistant in petrography and graduate student at Harvard, I was encouraged by Wolff to plan for Heidelberg. There I was to find H. Rosenbusch, who had put system into the infinite series of minerals in rocks. But my journey to Heidelberg began with a geography congress in London and a geology congress in Zurich. These meetings were with such bigwigs as Lord Curzon, Henry M. Stanley, and famous arctic explorers, and I was surprised to find that all these VIP’s looked like ordinary men. Unfortunately for me, this realization came a little late.

Looking for a luncheon beer garden in Zurich, I picked up a small side-whiskered Englishman, and suggested we join a group of foreign geologists in a buffet. “Oh no,” he replied, “no beer. I only want a cup of tea and a biscuit.” So I left him and crudely and youthfully joined the younger men in the beer parlor for sauerkraut and wienies and Munich beer. Later at the opening meeting, the Geological Congress was addressed in French by the famous Sir Archibald Geikie, Director General of the Geological Survey of Great Britain and Ireland, and the author of “The textbook of geology,” the greatest of geology manuals. He was my pickup, whom I had deserted at lunch time. I had lost the opportunity of a lifetime, for a tête-a-tête with the world’s most famous geologist.

Before going to Munich, Harry Gummeré of Haverford and I trekked through Denmark in a third class carriage amid peasants smoking fearful-smelling tobacco in long china-bowl pipes. Then we crossed to Christiansand in Norway. We traversed the fjords north to Trondhjem by rowboat, in “stoolcars” with little girl drivers. Then we traveled on foot, and everywhere in rain. Waterfalls were so numerous we never wanted to hear of another one. We climbed up to Stalheim from Bergen, saw the Jordalsknut, a magnificent half dome in a vast granite canyon like Yosemite. We rowed around the Kaiser’s yacht in the Nordfjord, and tried to pick him out on deck. We got soaked with days of rain in a backcountry village, and went to the inn, got into bed, and sent our clothing to dry in the kitchen.

The local Norwegian bank looked at our Brown Brothers letter of credit and said, “Nothing doing,” which inspired us to compose a poem:

We’re so happy we don’t know what to do.

We haven’t any clothes to wear,

We’re wet all through and through.

We haven’t any money and we ought to feel quite blue

But we don’t, we feel so happy, we don’t know what to do.

Fortunately, the innkeeper was amused by our poem and sympathetic toward our plight. He took our IOU’s and told us we could have all the money we wanted and to send it back when we reached Trondhjem.

From Trondhjem we crossed Scandinavia by rail to Stockholm, like Venice a city of canals. Delightful maiden ladies kept the breakfast place and served us with many queer breads, goats’-milk cheese, and sublime cleanliness. The canal boat took us across Sweden to Göteborg. It was a little steamer, from the porthole of which we saw a cow comfortably grazing a few feet away. And we saw and were impressed by the superb landscaping of lawns, by tree horticulture, and by lock masonry. In both Norway and Sweden the people talked English, the national costumes were delightful, the girls were pretty, and everybody was clean and democratic.

The winter semester of 1894–1895 was spent in Munich, where Groth’s mineral and crystal collections were the main attraction, and where I heard the lectures of Sir Doktor Privy-Councillor Knight Karl A. von Zittel, author of six huge volumes on fossil shells, fossil horses, fossil dragons, and fossil trees, and a history of geology. We once saw him rigged out in gold braid and an admiral’s fore-and-aft cocked hat for some imperial function.

He was a forceful lecturer. The assistant arranged diagrams on the rack, the students gathered, and then his majesty entered. Everyone rose and Zittel held forth with a rattan pointer: “Es gibt, meine Herren, ein ganze anzahl von ausgezeichnete beobachten über” and so forth. Then he whacked the drawings, and made graceful allusion to American investigators as he explained a giant stegosaurus.

In the “Heidelberger Geologischer Panoptikum,” as an attic room on the Neckar was called, I afterwards posted a ditty based on “Ole Uncle Ned”:

There was an Orthopod

Stegosaurus Marshii

Laid him down on his Jurassic bed.

He had a row of shovels down the middle of his back

But he didn’t have a very big head.

Chorus:

Hammer, hammer, hammer on the stone

Chisel, chisel, chisel on the bone

There’s no more rest for poor old Steg

For Zittel couldn’t leave him alone.

Heidelberg days were memorable for the lectures of Rosenbusch, Goldschmidt, and Osann; for laboratory system; and for long collection trips. With specimen bag and hammer, we went to Saxony, Bohemia and the Vosges Mountains, the Black Forest, and the Oberwald. I had a large, pointed hammer named Umslopagaas, after Rider Haggard’s hero who wielded such a weapon. When Palache and Brock and I were in a quarry and an unwieldy boulder had to be broken, the yell arose, “Umslopagaas come quick!” The collection of rock specimens at “classical” localities, meant the textbook rocks of Rosenbusch, or of Zirkel of Leipzig. Every student dreamed of having a private collection.

After the Ascutney experience, I was impressed by Schneeberg granite in Saxony. At the border of the granite are slates, baked in zones back from the granite edge: hard horn rock, spotted rock, mica rock, then claystone. The colored geological map of Saxony was superb. This includes the mining district of the birthplace of geology in Europe, where in Freiberg, A. G. Werner had founded an arbitrary science in the eighteenth century, imagining granites to be crystallized from a world-wide ocean.

In one place I found a hand specimen with tiny granite tongues which had split their way, as liquid as alcohol, between the blackened folia of slate. The granite itself was all crystals, but here was proof of a fluid when the granite penetrated. What was it, how hot was it, a gas, a foam, a paste, or a liquid? The time this occurred was millions of years before Kaiser Wilhelm. I had found something similar in the Yellowstone, the little dikes of sylvan intrusives in Absaroka Mountains. The smallest tongues showed the most perfect granite in the microscope, of Tertiary intrusive stocks. It was as though in these siliceous invasions of basaltic agglomerate, nature made its best experimental granitization on a very small scale.

We soaked up the surprises of European scholarship. We pored over books in the bookshops, loaded ourselves with microscopes, goniometers, and four-volume textbooks. We found all the science of Europe in attractive unbound form and had it bound in half morocco. Mineral dealers were everywhere, offering beautifully labeled specimens. All things in Europe seemed inexpensive.

Rosenbusch, who had big brown eyes and a gray beard, came to look over my work on feldspar, in his laboratory. When I asked enthusiastically what make and model of German microscope I ought to buy, he turned me around and looked deep into my eyes: “Herr Jaggar,” he said, “Es is nicht das Mikroskop, es ist der Mensch.”

Another time he produced a dense black rock and said to Matteucci of Vesuvius, to Palache, and to me, “You are geologists. What for a rock is that?” We, of course, got it wrong, thinking it must be a lava. It turned out to be a black limestone, easily identified, had we scratched it instead of putting our lenses on it. He chuckled at the gullibility of geologists.

Osann gave a course on petrographic chemistry which met at 7 A.M.! We usually got there, but once or twice the teacher himself was late. We would gather around Osann, who was fat and genial, and say “Herr Professor, how about some sausages and beer and a little breakfast?” He always replied “Why not? There is plenty of time,” and we sought the nearest cafe.

Some professors got up at two o’clock in the morning and wrote, taking advantage of the quiet hours. Rosenbusch had a high desk and wrote standing up. Their objectives were to produce enormous tomes listing all crystals and all rocks and all publications, in all languages. This is German science. Its password is “thoroughness.”

The net effect of German scholarship on me was a feeling of irksomeness and resentment, but what I learned of thoroughness and of mechanisms I value extremely. I honor the memory of those teachers, and I honor their pupils, who by specialism have penetrated deeper and deeper into the smaller and smaller things of matter. The ultimate is the background material between the galaxies of the universe and the unknown background particles of life. But for me, the middle field—the development of mountains, rivers and sea bottoms, continents and volcanoes, earthquakes and depressions of land, the sky, clouds, and waters—all the outside world, needed experimental engineers. Intermediate bigger things like the crust of the earth and moon, within the time that is measured in human years, seemed to be neglected by science, and yet to be accessible to the giant power of engineering.

Rosenbusch set me at one feldspar specimen for an entire summer. I wanted things moving, changing, and evolving. I wanted a narrative of that tabular feldspar crystallizing, or better, a dish wherein to watch it crystallize. To me it seemed that Faraday or Pasteur would have described the quality of a moving feldspar medium in pressure, heat, gas, liquid, or changing particles. The qualitative investigator would have a furnace and make many trials and produce synthetic feldspar, and he would write a narrative approximating what the under earth must do. He would make melt or froth conditions successful in imitating such rocks as basalt or granite, using hot gases.

The problem of basalt and granite began to be recognized in the eighteenth century. Werner guessed, and taught his pupils, that these rocks were sea bottom deposits. A few determined Europeans in the nineteenth century—Fouqué and Michel-Lévy, Doelter, and Morozewicz—melted mineral mixtures and made igneous rocks by cooling them. The motive was approximation; the result was good and useful. No one reached melting by hot gases and absorption of hot gases. No one made granite. Volcanic rocks were imitated approximately as to crystals, but not as to gases. And the whole of volcanism was later proved to be gases, as is the whole of physics and astronomy and biology. Man is largely a puff of hydrogen.

These visions were what I brought back from Europe, along with much pondering of such experimenters as Daubrée, Lacroix, Stanislas Meunier, Reyer, and my teacher Goldschmidt, all brilliant imitators of the earth. Goldschmidt gave a course in blowpipe analysis which was completely original. His methods went far beyond those of his predecessors.

Meanwhile, W. M. Davis had written me to come home to Harvard and give the course in field geological surveying. This was in 1895–1896.

My teaching was devised to cut up the map of Boston. I pasted the pieces in notebooks and sent out students in pairs, equipped with map books. They were to keep pencils sharp, use a uniform system, and hammer off specimens from ledges. They were to examine the rock under a magnifying glass, then name it; but I cautioned them, “If you don’t know the rock, call it ‘FRDK, funny rock don’t know.’” Students marked the page opposite each map with symbols for the rocks on that map. Then they came together in seminar, and we made a colored map of the geology of Boston. Laurence La Forge, now professor at Tufts College, was my student and later my assistant. He published the results of our work many years after the study was made.

When teaching was extended into experimental geology and geology of the United States, laboratories were set up in the basement of Agassiz Museum and I was given carte blanche to furnish them. I equipped them with a water tank, a gas furnace for melting and recrystallizing minerals, pressure machines, an air compressor, and motors. Students were assigned experiments with wax, plaster, cement, sands, coal dust, and marble dust. They imitated strata, rivers, deltas, intrusions, and mountain folds, and familiarized themselves with the way solids break.

Each man took a special arbeit for his final thesis, and worked by himself with clock or metronome, thermometer or pressure gauge, spring balance or centimeter scale, and he reviewed the experiments of the past. Prominent among my students were Ralph Stone, afterwards state geologist for Pennsylvania; Vernon Marsters of Indiana; Julius Eggleston of Riverside, California; and Ernest Howe of Yale.

In the course on United States geology were such students as Amadeus Grabau who became leading paleontologist of China; Stefansson the arctic explorer; Ellsworth Huntington, afterwards the distinguished Yale author and geographer; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. With so many Roosevelts at Harvard, I quite forgot my famous student until his first visit to Hawaii, in 1934. Mr. Roosevelt had remembered his geology professor, though, and an aide phoned the Volcano headquarters to request that I be at Hilo when the President’s ship arrived.

The United States geology course was the product of my two seasons in the Yellowstone and my interest in the great Hayden, King, and Powell surveys. The youthful geologists needed to know the continent and its details.

The big Washington monographs and folios have made a gallery of underground pictures of one of the greatest continents, and these are supplemented by the work of the Canadian geologists. America shows Appalachian folds and thrusts, fault blocks of the Utah plateaus, and eruptives of the Rockies. It contains the amazing metamorphism of very recently upheaved sea beds along the Pacific shore. It records the remnant sea bottoms and dust-storm deposits of the vast plains, bearing beside the obvious buffalo skulls, the old bones of whales, reptiles, and rhinos.

Superposed on all this is so-called physiography, the science of falling materials and water, the rotting of the lands, and the accumulation of debris. A net of rivers over ground and under ground is what stands out, and the living river pattern has changed incessantly through the ages. But through and over it is a moving process of the ages, kinetic, alive with glaciers, hot springs, underground heat or surface cold, soaking rains and rushing storms, earthquake and uplift, fault motions and sinkings. Everything is in motion to one who senses slow motion, occasionally breaking down resistance and charging ahead. And geology is a sense of slow motion and its jumps for 5 million years, with this human year, here and now, of great importance. Geology, like humanity, is not just history.

Under all are gas and heat; Saratoga Springs, Yellowstone, the Comstock Lode, and Mount Shasta. The series gets hotter from New York to California. And out at sea the refuse of the continent is dumping all day long. And science is anxiously waiting to learn how hot sea bottom is.

In addition to laboratory work, I wanted to conduct cross-country hikes for such subjects as botany, geology, and zoology in the forests and swamps and hills of Massachusetts. And it was in connection with these plans that I learned a lesson in simplicity. I went to President Eliot, remembering the high sounding “Pierian Sodality” name for the college orchestra, to get a classical calendar name for my cross-country tramps. He said, “What, in brief, is your idea?” I replied, “In ordinary language they will be natural history walks.” He took a pen and said, “Why not this for a name?” On the paper was written “Natural History Walks.”

An important part of our curriculum was the Tuesday evening geological conference, during which any graduate worker could give a paper. To these conferences came, at different times, Brooks, Spurr, Schrader, Goodrich, Mendenhall, P. S. Smith, Mansfield, Matthes, Lane, Crosby, Barton, Douglas Johnson, Daly, and all the Harvard staff. The men got confidence in public speaking and exhibiting, and the professors commented in kindly fashion. Topics ranged from summer work in the far west and current studies in meteorology under Ward to petrographic or experimental work with projection apparatus under Wolff and me. Jackson and Hyatt brought in fossils, and the Geological Survey was always in evidence as a goal for young men, or a subject for review. Shaler’s comments were accompanied by a string of good stories. The conferences taught students how to teach by making them speak in public. It was one of Shaler’s most productive inventions, and has been copied far and wide.

Walcott in the Survey looked to Harvard to produce field mappers of rocks. Graduate students had the choice between process and history, geography linked to school teaching, microscopical petrography and crystallography linked to the minerals and rock collections, or evolution linked to museums and fossils. Beecher of Yale had found hairs on the legs of fossil trilobites. Someone else had found fossil bacteria. A group of petrographers got together and founded an artificial classification of fire-made rocks based on chemistry—no use at all to the field man with a rock specimen. Agassiz had built a magnificent museum. The research motive was based on collections; the public exhibit motive was based on evolution and big, rare things. The publication motive imitated Europe; “be as technical as possible, detest reporters and newspapers, and never be popular.”

In 1897 Harvard University gave me a Ph.D. degree, after a double thesis and an oral examination. I passed the examination very awkwardly, as my capacity for remembering text book information is nil. My theses were (1) on an invention, a mineral hardness instrument; and (2) on the included fragments found in Boston dikes.

The microsclerometer, as the instrument was called (that is, a microscope scratcher), was designed to diamond drill a mineral to a fixed depth. The hardness was measured by the time consumed, on the theory that the energy required for the standard hole varied with the time, and the time with the hardness. The number of rotations with a constant speed motor is a measure of the time.

The paper was published in America and Germany, and elaborately reviewed by a microscopical society in England. The instrument was borrowed by H. C. Boynton, a graduate student in metallurgy, and he got good results on the microscopic crystals that constitute steel. The inventing and constructing with the aid of Sven Nelson, a Swedish mechanician of ability, were to me an education in themselves. For one thing, I learned how enthusiastically science feeds on ultra-little things.

My petrography of included quartz fragments in basalt dikes was partly published, but made no hit at all. It was outdoor work, it concerned the granite problem, it revealed the “fluid” of granite minerals as “waters or vapors” having no effect on augite, the green fusible mineral of basalt. But the same fluid was revealed as corroding quartz inclusions, harder and supposedly more infusible.

If temperature had anything to do with it, the granite fluid could melt holes in quartz inclusions, but the mantle of augite dark crystals which the basalt had plastered on the outside of the quartz fragments remained unmelted. This was my first adventure with the ancient problem of fusion, or melting. I became convinced that granite fluids, like the makers of gold quartz veins, are low temperature vapors or gasses. This agrees with what is now well known, that silica has a low melting point. But melting and temperature are not the whole story.

To me, the spreading of one’s fame by scientific papers was commercialization. “You must make your name known” and “what have you published?” rang through the scientific halls of learning. No suggestion of art, literature, drama, beauty, or philosophy ever came to me from my scientific colleagues. Some literary friends, like William Garrott Brown and my classmate William Vaughn Moody, thought readability important. Brown warned me against the dullness of small papers in scientific writing. Agassiz warned me against exactly the opposite, namely, against popularizing or being interesting. This antithesis between science journals and art probably never comes into the field of vision of many young scientific writers. They see only “Write for your scientific peers and for no one else, that is your world.” All my life I have been plagued by “be as technical as possible” versus “tell the public what it all means.”

I suspect that our system is producing diagrams and statistics in geology (and perhaps in science generally) and no longer produces works of art. I know few geologists who are fine draftsmen. They accept photography instead. I know none who is a literary stylist. They write for ultra conciseness and tabulations. The nineteenth century taught classical English and drawing.

Geology is a science of the dreamland of the earth’s interior and of millennia of the ages and of the overwhelming expanse of rich, productive, unknown ores under ocean bottoms. It is a field for men of letters, and for new Magellans, Humboldts, and Darwins bursting with imagination and the will to explore.

This seeming digression is really germane to the purport of this book. It is one man’s review of a half century of evolving discovery. Also a half century of evolving error and departure from the ways of the leaders. The leaders, from William Smith’s thoroughness with strata in England, to Clarence King’s summary of a thousand miles across the Cordillera, explored upward and outward. It persuaded governments. Persuasion before the court of public opinion no longer uses and employs explorer men of letters. The United Nations is not employing Clarence Kings on the world geology of the remaining three quarters of the earth.

The confusion, the secrecy, and the loss of art are occasioned by vulgarization. In 1875 real men of distinction explored the earth. Now that is left to incorporated establishments, teaching trusts, and calculating machines. Clarence King was a linguist and was the son of a trader in China. His Yale training under Dana and Brush gave him real culture. His founding of the United States Geological Survey was the evolution of a genius who disliked politics and whose friends rejoiced with him in great prose, good pictures, and fine sculpture. Then he was wrecked by a false ambition and the decadence of the very thing which made him great, the simplicity of high thinking, noble writing, and cultivated friends. Lacking today are cultivated boys with an ambition to explore the globe, both under the sea and in the wilderness.

Geology in 1897 was a jigsaw puzzle, with a choice between the museum and the field, between the easy thing of collections, fine microscopes, and the scientific societies, and the hard thing of exploring the globe. Collections and instruments were an overpowering attraction, particularly when photography and experiment were involved. But roughing it in the wilderness has made some of the finest characters I ever knew.

Geological surveys of the west continued to occupy me during the summers. I worked in the Black Hills of South Dakota under Samuel Franklin Emmons, and my associates included John Mason Boutwell, John Duer Irving, Philip Sidney Smith, Bailey Willis, and N. H. Darton. Boutwell was to become a copper geologist and copper magnate in the mines of Utah; Irving, Professor of Economic Geology at Lehigh and Yale; and Smith, head of the Alaskan branch of the U. S. Geological Survey.

Being with Emmons, Willis, and Darton in the Black Hills field was to learn variously how geologists work in the field and how their minds work. Emmons was of the Boston Brahmins, a Harvard man, mining geology his specialty, with the Clarence King tradition of the Great West, the 40th Parallel Survey.

Bailey Willis as Chief Geologist spent a week with us in camp, and I saw his genius for drawing in line, and he explained the four-step pacing method. Willis mapped distances by pacing across mountains, counting in his head, while talking at the same time. He compiled in color a geologic map of the United States. His marvellous experiments on mountain folding, his explorations in all the continents and his poetic faith in hydrogen and crystallization as internal forces made his name immortal.

N. H. Darton mapped the Great Plains; and his genius was for hard work, long field hours, color photography at its very beginning, and an extraordinary eye for detail in the field.

Darton showed me how to find the Chadron Formation on the divides, white clays easily overlooked. Darton’s many years, traversing the entire West, and publishing superb monographs of artesian waters and of immense fossil sea bottoms, summarizing the geology of whole states from Texas to Canada, ranks him among the great geologists. I learned from him detail of infinite discovery possible in every rock ledge. He found tiny fossil shells everyone else had missed. Powell and King had painted impressionistic geology. Darton followed and painted thousands of miniatures, but also combined these into large books.

Charles Doolittle Walcott was Director of the U. S. Geological Survey at that time, and no greater geologist ever lived. His Cambrian fossils, those of the first great fossil-making “Mediterranean Sea” of North America, lay buried in the United States from shore to shore. Unswervingly he followed every inland sea of 531 million years ago and thereafter, through advances three times across the continent. Lands were of moderate relief and climates were mild. Marine animals and sea weeds, large and small, were abundant for 80 million years. And remember that a million years is a thousand times the interval since William the Conqueror.

The continent Walcott mapped of that ancient time was the North America of today, with sags that let in shallow sea strips and pools where the Cambrian shales and limestones now lie. He wrote a description of that vast history, and all his later summers were spent in the Canadian Rockies, where fossil-bearing strata make the most startling mountain peaks on earth.

My Black Hills surveys of 1898 and 1899 were near Deadwood and Spearfish and Mato Tepee, the Devil’s Tower National Monument. In those badlands with weird desert gorges, appear the bones of ancient rhinoceroses and many grotesque animals, huge and tiny, of 40 to 60 million years ago. We found little bones in white earth on the divides still preserved against erosion.

Our big job was to map the laccoliths near Deadwood. A laccolith, or rock cistern, is a lava body which in very ancient times squirted into the cracks of the strata. The lava had penetrated between the strata of the northern cover of the Black Hills, swelled to lenses between the strata; and, particularly, it selected and penetrated the soft shale beds which grow thicker and more numerous upward among the formations. Thus after erosion of the present landscape, both large and small lava lenses were revealed as resistant hills, the largest toward the bottom of the pile of strata and the smallest and steepest toward the top in thick, black ancient mud deposits.

Mostly, the laccoliths were injections of volcanic fluid up a crack, which met a hard bed and bent to squeeze the paste or lava into a soft layer. The result was an underground lava flow which ruptured the beds. Apparently the first rush brought up fragments of the rocks below. This fragmentary stuff of mud and gravel was overridden by the lava, until the latter penetrated horizontally a mile or two between strata, arched the layers above, and solidified at the Devil’s Tower with vertical columns like the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland.

This group of subterranean volcanic eruptions between strata probably came under sea bottom at the same time that the Yellowstone upland began its open-air outpourings farther west. But in the Black Hills there is no sign the laccolith lavas ever broke up to the top country.

The Black Hills, like the Rocky Mountains, were a long time rising in waves of action, whereas the lava intrusion was a relatively short episode of one of the latest of these spasms. However, that episode entails a long story of numerous injections. It takes us down into crust and along through the millennia.

Always think in millions of years. It is wise also to think in millions of miles and to remember that the sun and the Milky Way are parts of the same system as the earth. And remember that a ledge or a boulder doesn’t worry about living 20 million or 100 million years. A skull is a boulder. That old brontotherium rhinoceros with a forked horn, standing eight feet high and fifteen feet long, lived in the upper Oligocene, when clay and volcanic ash were being deposited in the Bad Lands of South Dakota. Probably vast flood plains of rivers were his habitat, swamp reeds and leaves were his food, and floods washed his bones and buried his skull where we find them today. The country of open glades was probably like the safari land of central Africa.

Brontotherium’s skull in Chicago Natural History Museum dates from about 30 million years ago. The bones are scattered, and few complete skeletons have been found. Man’s ancestor may have started 10 million years ago, but the nearest approach to an ape who lived in the trees of old Bronto’s forests was an opossum. Furthermore, nothing like flint tools have been found in the rhino strata. The apes started in Europe and Asia in the next geologic period, and some fossilized monkeys have been found in South America. But men and monkeys are too soft. They don’t make good fossils.

The bones we found were of turtles, in clays upheaved on the top of the Black Hills uplift. These clays were afterwards eroded into the present valleys, and probably were contemporaneous with the riverbed silts, where the rhinoceros skulls were found. So our turtles and rhinos were no doubt neighbors in 29,998,000 B.C.

Our sojourn in the Black Hills was not without adventure. One evening when Boutwell and I were riding home to Deadwood, I dismounted and jumped into the shrubs of a gully to knock a rock specimen off a ledge. From beneath my feet came a buz-z-z like a swarm of bees. I had jumped right on a rattlesnake and could feel his coils against my ankle, and no leggings that day. Boutwell called out, “Oh let me see him! I’ve never seen a rattlesnake.” I made a suitable reply and, somehow, leapt clear before the snake had a chance to strike.

Another adventure concerned my gold watch, a gift from my dad on my twenty-first birthday. I lost it from a chain which broke against the saddle pommel at some dismounting point. I advertised for it by placards at railway stations and, amazingly, it was returned. A Salvation Army man found the watch, badly trampled by my horse, at a back country place, brought it to me in Deadwood, and received the reward. I took it to the maker in Waltham, where it was restored; and I am wearing it fifty-four years later, converted from a hunting case to a stemwinder.

John Irving of Yale, whose father had been a mining geologist in the Great Lakes district, was one of the most lovable companions I ever camped and tramped with. We were together in the Black Hills, where we hired a wagon outfit to cross the Hills to the Devil’s Tower. The personnel was a masterpiece of improvisation. The cook was a fat boy who told marvellous tales of adventures. Among other things, he had been a human ostrich in the circus, and he assured us that chewing up glass and swallowing it did no harm if you knew how. So elaborate was his cooking that again and again we ran out of grub. Furthermore, meals were generally late, but we knew better than to hurry the supper and his finishing touches. When finally a meal was ready, he advanced to our tent, bowed, and called out, “Gentlemen, you will now proceed to sagastuate.”

Johnston the teamster was an ambitious South Dakota high school graduate and farm boy who wanted to learn all he could from geological surveyors. A few years ago, in the nineteen forties, I received a letter from him in southwest Africa saying that he had been successful in placer mining for gold and diamonds and that he was writing a book about it.

Arizona was my fourth field of fire-made irruptions; after New England, the Black Hills, and the Yellowstone (old, middle-aged, and young). To the Bradshaw Mountains between Prescott and Phoenix and lying south of the Grand Canyon, I was sent with Palache to make the Bradshaw Mountains folio.

At Prescott we had the rare privilege of talks with Clarence King. An aged bachelor dying of tuberculosis, he was living in a cottage with an old negro servant. King was a fascinating talker and writer. He had been the first director of the Geological Survey and was the author of “Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada.” His great summary volume of the 40th Parallel, the survey along the Union Pacific, is one of the classics in literature and in geology. His model, unhappily for him, was Alexander Agassiz, who made a great fortune out of Calumet and Hecla copper. When King went into mining to make a fortune he contracted tuberculosis. He died soon after we saw him.

The problem of what makes granite was never better illustrated than in the Bradshaws. One formation, in upright bands for miles across country, showed dark schist, diorite, granite, diabase, granite, light schist, quartzite, granite, gabbro, and schist again, like a succession of dikes, slabs, and veins side by side. A mountain spur, like a bookshelf with colored books on edge, is called Crooks Complex, and was named after Crooks Canyon. The trend was with the pinched strata but the stuff was mostly igneous.

It was as though a mechanism of melting-up was mixed with intrusion of fluid, but what fluid? A glass? or a gas? There was no smearing, but clean-cut dikes and schist slabs on edge. In the big granite hills there were contact breakups with fragments of schist imprisoned in granite, but not smeared or streaked. The impression was of millions of years and thousands of episodes, all dike-making and guided by the upright lamination or vertical structure of the ancient altered tightly folded clay and sand strata, squeezed together by horizontal pressure.

Since learning of the million-year periods taught by radioactivity, and of the many million years within a single era of geology, I have begun to wonder whether these very old formations may represent hundreds of millennia, with granitization happening over and over again, in each geological revolution of upheaval and mountain building above.

Granitization, then, is a process of heat pressure, gases, melting, and crystal making, of which the ancient words magma or emulsion or paste give no conception. And volcanism, up through the deep crust, is the mystery devil. May it not be nucleonics and melting of deep crust, rather than chemistry? And is not the mystery devil always hydrogen gas?

At the beginning of the twentieth century I visited two places which are close together and related to the Bradshaw Mountains. One was Searchlight in the southern tip of Nevada, the other was the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River.

I shall never forget my arrival in Searchlight. A strike of miners was going on, and Stanford geology students had been sent in as strike breakers. Big Bill, the sheriff, brought the boys across the desert from the railway. His buckboard was in front and the Stanforders followed in a wagon. The strikers lined the road out from Searchlight, intent on loosing the horses. But when they saw Bill’s star and his notched six-shooter, they dropped their hands to their sides and stood like a row of tin soldiers, while Big Bill led the way through at a gallop, cursing them roundly.

When I got off the train at Ivanpah, a small place with only a few houses, I spoke to a young station agent where the ancient Wells Fargo sign hung. He told me that the Quartette Mine team would meet me soon, and shortly a cloud of dust on the desert proclaimed the vehicle which came dashing up, a phaeton rig with two big horses. The five men inside were armed, with rifles and pump shotguns protruding. One man pulled out a heavy leathern pouch, and another stood over it with his rifle. “Come on, Jack, lets go over to Wolf Saloon.” “No,” said Jack, “not till I get my receipt.” The mild station man yanked out a receipt book, filled the blank acknowledging $20,000 in bullion from the mine, threw the pouch into an open safe, and Jack with his receipt departed, leaving the gold brick to the mystic protection of that sign, “Wells Fargo and Co.” Two ablebodied bandits could easily have held up the whole rail terminus.

When I started for the mine, accompanied by detectives and guards, we all carried pistols in holsters strapped under our arms. En route, we spent Christmas amid the smell of sagebrush and the glorious sunset lights of a purple desert. Once more I murmured, “So this is natural history.”

I was employed to examine the Quartette Gold Mine, and the geologic mystery of the origin of a million dollars in dirt between a level 200 feet down and another at a depth of 500 feet. The million dollars was along a crushed, slipped, so-called vein, where a fault followed the upright bedding of just such gneisses, granite dikes, and schists as had made Crooks Complex in the Bradshaws. Where gold was richest, minerals were richest—beautiful orange-colored wulfenite, green chrysocolla, blue azurite, onyx, quartz, and calcite. Everywhere were quantities of gouge, or crushed clays, from grinding walls. Native gold particles were distributed through all this.

The schists were filled with lava fissure fillings, and the mine was where this pattern of bands was interrupted by a very ancient greenstone or basalt body. Hot fluids of the volcanic period, deep underground, had accompanied fault slipping or fracture where the ore was, the vertical fault parallel to the upright layers and across the greenstone contact.

Ore and gold particles were directly related to fracture, to the fault slipping on an upright crack of one mountain block against another, to the hot vapors depositing the mineral collection, and to renewed crushing and sliding on the mountain blocks. This was during or following some part of the volcanic period when all the cracks were injected with andesite lavas, or what the miners call porphyry. The origin of the minerals was in lead and copper sulfides which lie deeper down.

A hundred miles to the northeast is the Grand Canyon, and all around are granite mountains, just as in Arizona. These Searchlight schists are the same Algonkian ancient strata, recrystallized and granitized, that make the inner gorge of the canyon, and are traversed up cracks by volcano-making lavas, such as dot the north bank of the canyon with crater cones. Above in the canyon are the horizontal strata from Cambrian up to the Coal Measures and beyond. The vast maze of castles and turrets is a net of branch valleys of the Colorado, trenching through these old seabed deposits.

Including Searchlight ore, the whole history going backward is top country desert, deep trench, strata piled in rivers and sea bottoms for 500 million years, and lastly faulting and cracking that squirted steam and made gold minerals over and over again during the last 100 million years. There were at least a dozen revolutions that lifted and lowered mountain ranges and continents for 2,000 million years, and the remains of iron-eating bacteria and of seaweeds and other living things that go back for 1,500 million years. Through it all are granite injections as a process, as a mystery, going over the whole range of years in different ages, and meaning what?

One of the puzzles of Grand Canyon, Bradshaw Mountains, and Searchlight—if not also of New England, the Black Hills, and the Yellowstone—is faulting. A fault is what a geologist means by a crack down deep where the country rock has dropped down on one side so as to make a discordance across country. Earthquake faults make a visible bank or step or sidewise slip, changing the surface after an earthquake.

The northwestern states are partly mapped as fault block mountains. The island of Hawaii has a series of fault step blocks southeast, slipping toward the ocean. The steep east face of the Sierra Nevada is a fault fracture.

Professor Shaler once stopped me on the street and said of my field work, “Jaggar, you don’t teach faulting enough.” Faults were shown along straight lines on the color maps of formation in the old Boston books, and were located by guesswork if glacier deposits covered up the ledges. It seemed to me that faults ought to be proved or else omitted from the maps. Probably I too was wrong, for faults or cracks completely concealed by soil and strata are tremendous unknown lines on the globe.

The Searchlight ore body is certainly a fault fracture, and so are those of Tonopah and hundreds of mines. It was digging that proved it. The cracking and slipping and steaming and mud-making on the fissure are what brought up the minerals.

A question arises as to how much the Grand Canyon itself and its tributaries are guided by fault fractures under valleys. My impression was in 1901, and it still is, that “Jaggar ought to teach faulting” more than he then did.

The primitive ocean blocks of earth crust sank, while continents remained high, leaving the earth crust a mosaic of blocks large and small, high and low. Between the blocks spout the volcanoes. I have never agreed with C. E. Dutton that volcanic heat energy could come from shallow pockets under those fault blocks. Even he acknowledged the weakness of the argument. If the earth crust broke up and the blocks variously sank in the core matter, leaving continents as a complex of high blocks, then the blocks are deep and are still moving. The movements are in years, year-thousands and year-millions. Volcanism up the cracks releases core energy. So does much of fault movement, namely earthquakes. And these facts geologists do not appreciate.

So we get faulted river courses and fault cracks up which came fluids that transformed sediments of rivers, lakes, deserts, and seas into granite, felsite, and greenstone. These are the ancient names. There are hundreds of other, geology names. But geology produced no Faraday.

I disliked geology in 1902. And I disliked mining because of its secrecy and its devotion to profits. Geology failed to tell businessmen the mystery of granite, of felsite, and of greenstone. Astronomers told the same men of mysteries, and they were fascinated. Physiology led them to cells, plants, animals, and chemicals in the blood, solving mystery after mystery. Men, money, inventions, engineers, buildings, and staffs grew by leaps and bounds in those sciences. The best geology could do was guesswork—a mastodon, a big reptile skeleton, a guesswork color map—while seventy percent of the earth was seabottom rock, unmapped, and twenty percent more consisted of fractures covered with soil.

Seeing the Carnegie and Rockefeller laboratories and observatories, I grieved for field geology. The public did not even know that granite, the mystery, is the commonest rock and that quartz, the gold maker, is the commonest mineral. Nor did they know that both are almost absent from the whole Pacific. Nor that geology is almost ignorant of their origin and injection, if it is injection. Here was the globe, the end product of astronomy, the most fascinating research in the whole range of science. The source of all raw materials of commerce, yet its fire-made rocks and its seabottom rocks remained a mystery.

Before leaving the Grand Canyon, let me record my impressions of the erosion. It is a gorge a mile deep usually described as “cut” by the Colorado River. As I shall show in discussion of experiments with the Grand Canyon model, it is possible, in stratified layers yielding grit to flowing rainwater, to cut a deep canyon by surface runoff. It is possible for underground water and tributaries from side rainfalls to increase the volume of such a stream greatly in a hundred miles. But Dutton’s showing of upheaved and downdropped big blocks of broken mountains, and such obvious breaks as the Tonto and Bright Angel faults shown to tourists as traced out by Bright Angel Canyon, prove that the earth crust is broken. And Searchlight showed a fault to be a water supply.

The enormous canyon appeared to me to be a million-year break system of earth-crust rotting. The water is a giant modern grinding mill of rainfall, underground accumulation, and transport. But with five great erosion surfaces shown in the discordances, from 2,000 million years ago to the present day; and with upheaval of the high plateaus in block faults, and bent strata age after age; and farther north with recent volcanoes that spouted up the cracks, it seems more vivid to think the valleys at least partly water-filled cracks and chasms. Volcanoes cannot be shallow. The canyons and the great bend are different from the Green River source, because of upward push in waves. The up-push of the Uinta Mountains is well known to have been slow. It kept pace with the ruptures followed by the river. Going back to Daubrée, rivers follow cracks much more than do the textbooks.

In 1899 two things happened which affected the rest of my life. First, Director Walcott asked me to furnish estimates for a Hawaii geologic survey, a request which eventually led me to Hawaii. Second, the Yakutat Bay earthquake snapped on an astonished world, though most of the world didn’t know it.

The Yakutat Bay earthquakes in Alaska, in September 1899, were accompanied by the pushing up of the bedrock shoreline by forty-seven feet. Lowered beneath the sea were whole forests, on glacial deposits pulled down by submarine landslips. It was an uninhabited region at the foot of Mount St. Elias, along a fjord penetrating far into the mountains. It came in line with the Aleutian trench, under the Pacific, 4,000 fathoms deep. The earthquakes lasted two weeks.

This colossal movement of blocks of the earth’s crust hundreds of miles across gave one the impression that we knew little of what was going on. Remembering that seventy-two percent of the earth’s surface is covered by oceans and that less than ten percent is really inhabited, I awoke to how much there was to learn. If whole forests and their roots could float away into the Pacific currents, with all their plants and animals and seeds and bacteria, what might not have occurred in past ages, when such jostling of crust blocks was common.

But before I was to experiment with live volcanoes came a decade of laboratory experiment.

Chapter II
Imitating Ripplemarks

“The Constitution is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”

At the end of the century my experiments with the sclerometer, and with the class in experimental geology, steered me for years into laboratory experiment. Europe was headed toward geophysics and geochemistry, meaning chiefly mathematical and statistical analysis. My vision was nonmathematical, though I used pressures, temperatures, clocks, and yardsticks to measure erosion, sediment, warping of strata, and melting.

This took me away from petrography, for the polarizing microscope was dealing with infinite series of minerals and molecules. I could see nothing but infinite penetration into the smaller and smaller. Clarence King and Frank Perret had been on the way to infinite journeying outward to the bigger and bigger.

The guiding formula was “erosion, sedimentation, deformation, and eruption.” Measure these on the globe, imitate them with mud pies in the laboratory. Compare the global examples with the mud pies. Try to get the mud pies to illuminate the gigantic stream systems, flood plains, sea bottoms, folded mountains, intrusions, and lavas of the earth. Then try to measure in the field those processes with observatories. So, to me, came the transition from collections to experiments.

The machinery of nature, whether with sand heaps or sand grains or coral pebbles, is the same. It is impelled by currents flowing over loose materials which make eddies in the lee of lumps. The eddies are either billows or cyclones. At the middle they are billows; at the ends they are cyclones. The billow eddies obstruct the heaping. The cyclone eddies lengthen the heaps right and left of the current direction. George Darwin studied the eddies by means of a drop of thick ink in a glass tank on top of a ripple ridgelet. The ink migrated to form underwater billows and cyclones, or vortexes. He used a dropper to place the ink globule, and then watched the vortexes form as he oscillated the tank.

Low parts travel fastest, namely the points. High parts build on the upstream side, and travel slowest, and the stuff tumbles over the crest line and is corniced by the eddy. Snow does it, pebbles under sea do it, and marine life adapts itself to it, wherever the food supply is best.

In the study of ripplemarks, Harry Gummeré, a graduate in astronomy, was my collaborator. Ripplemarks are made by back-and-forth eddies on the bottom, while big waves oscillate the water. We moved the bottom instead of making waves in the water. A glass plate sprinkled with sand under water in a tank was oscillated back and forth horizontally. It was clamped under a carriage which oscillated on wire tracks stretched across the tank. A string pulled the carriage against an elastic on the other side. A wooden wheel and crank, set upright edgeways, had holes and pegs to pull on the string, and the crank turns were timed with a metronome. The holes in the flat wheel were a centimeter apart, so that a revolution of the wheel pulled the string for every two centimeters of travel of the carriage. Thus the sand-covered plate was jerked back and forth under water two centimeters, four centimeters, six centimeters, and so forth; once a second, or two seconds, or three seconds, and so forth, by beats of the metronome.

The result was beautiful ripplemarks on a glass which could be lifted out of the water, dried, and placed over blueprint paper to preserve the record. The sizes of ridge to ridge ripples were from a fraction of an inch to two or more inches. The little ones diminished to zero when the jerking was small, the big ones washed out when the jerking was too big.

The blueprints showed that both length and speed of strokes (amplitude and acceleration of motion) made the ripples increase in size, and somewhere between the largest and smallest sand ripples was the optimum perfection of ripple form. The blueprints look like mackerel skies. And mackerel-sky clouds are billows of condensation between an upper cold stream of air and a lower moist one. In between are the same back-and-forth billows of vortex as in our sand.

At a geological conference at Harvard I showed blueprints made directly from glass plates covered with artificial ripplemarks. At the same time I exhibited rock slabs of fossil ripplemarks and photographs of others shaped like horseshoes. These were variants of the rippledrift process seen on sandy beds of running streams. I also showed photographs of swash marks running along the upper steep slopes of beaches. And of the wind-formed rippledrift of dry sand dunes. From the deserts of Peru come photographs of medaños, or crescent dunes, hills of sand tapering to curved points at both ends. The points are downwind, the high horseshoe toe of the hill is upwind, and like a coral atoll the edifice is current-formed.

Ripplemarks can form in hundreds of fathoms of ocean water if the storm waves on the surface of the sea are big enough. A particle of water on the crest of a wave is lifted up and down in a long vertical ellipse. A particle deep down under the wave is lifted fore and aft in a long horizontal ellipse. Under a three-hundred-foot length of wave in the English Channel in deep water the bottom particles of water are shoving sand back and forth, and making packed ripplemarks.

A big sand grain becomes a lump for small sand grains to bump against. They make a heap which piles up and lengthens out. The heaps merge and we get a tightly packed and ridged sandy bottom. Each ridge has an eddy first on one side, then on the other, as the water particles reverse in direction. Oscillation builds first flocculence, then alignment, then even spacing. The opposite sides of a ridge have equal slopes.

Rippledrift is made by a current in one direction. It is usually not so regular or in such straight ridges as ripplemarks. If a stream of water is jetted over sand round and round in a ringshaped tank, ridges will migrate along the bottom, but they are smeary. The regular ripples in dry sand on dunes have flatter slopes upwind, steep scarps downwind. They are regular, probably because wind blowing is intermittent and back currents occur. So they become more like ripplemarks.

On the bottoms of water streams, the horseshoe rippledrift requires a nice adjustment of lumps and side points migrating downstream. All rippling requires a sand of mixed sizes of grains. If they were all alike they would not ripple, for the larger grains have to obstruct the smaller ones in order to produce the ripple pattern. Rippledrifting as a whole is a building mechanism. Mixed with wave currents which move beaches along, including beach pebbles, it can be compounded into building oceanic islands. The crescent dunes of the desert are dependent on the prevailing winds being loaded with a sand supply at a windward erosion source.

Oceanic currents depend on the winds, like the trades in the tropics, and an obstructing bank or shoal adds surf action to the streaming. If corallines and Tridacna clams and crabs add organic cements, a horseshoe hill is built on the sea bottom. Big eddies will do the same kind of work as little eddies. This phenomenon extends all the way from the galaxies of stars with their beautiful spirals, to the spiral eddies in molten lava rushing down a pit crater, or to the streaming of protoplasm in a plant.

De Candolle, the great botanist, studied rippledrift in order to try to solve the most abstruse problem in all biology, the unsolved mystery of cell division. At some critical point a budding cell decides to form a partition and divide in two. Why or how? De Candolle thought that the protoplasm granules circulating around the cell walls might start regular lumps on those walls, and so build rippledrifts and make eddies.

Thus a current and an eddy and mathematics might start many of the doubles, triples, hexagons, and stars of the world of shells and living tissues. And the cells could pile up in symmetry in the submicroscopic world.

The erosion of the earth’s surface reveals symmetries. River maps look like trees with branches and with rivulets as twigs. Other symmetry is in the horizontal plane of the ocean, where headland furnishes pebbles and the sand sweeps into pure curves of beach and bar and cusp. So a delta builds into a lake of leaf shape and annual layers are added as the flood seasons come.

Some of the fingerlike drainage of erosion cuts into plowed lands during a rainy spell. This suggests what might be done with a spray, a mud bank, and a tank, to see how the finger valleys form. This erosion of the runoff of water was imitated in the Harvard laboratory.

A beautiful river pattern on a slope, like the trickle of raindrops on a windshield, was made by tipping up a rectangular glass plate covered with very liquid clay. A portion clung to the glass, and exquisite fernlike streams formed on the upper half of the plate, with a bank of distributaries of V-shape on the lower slope.

This glass plate was used for a surface of stamp mill slimes, of thicker beds, and was eroded with an atomizer and water by means of a barbershop air compressor. The slimes are very fine pounded sands with angular fragments. To get a stream pattern, this is necessary, so as to have fine grit to cut down the rivulets between the coarse grit remnants. This resembles the requirements for ripples.

The spray was kept going for hours. Meanwhile the river pattern at the steep sides of the sloping plate ate into the bank of sediment, robbing the streams of the main slope, because the side streams were oblique cascades. They dug deep, took off the water, and left the main slope streams without their headwater drainage. The pattern of the main slope became the headwater branches of the side streams, the streams which in plan drained over the edge of the uplifted plate right and left. This was somewhat like stream robbery.

For example, the Lewis River at the south end of Yellowstone Park once drained Yellowstone Lake, including the Lamar River, which is now the headwaters of Yellowstone River. The Yellowstone plateau formerly drained south into the Snake River and the Pacific Ocean. The Yellowstone River headwaters suddenly tapped the system, thanks to geyser erosion and acid corrosion, and the Yellowstone Canyon cut down rapidly, reversing to the north the outlet of Yellowstone Lake. Thereafter the lake flowed into the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. At some critical time about the glacial period the continental divide made a leap of thirty miles from the present head of the Canyon to the neighborhood of Lewis Lake, or from one end of Yellowstone Lake to the other. This is stream robbery.

Spray and runoff and rainfall and wash did not alone cut down the Yellowstone Canyon. The essentials were the rotting of rock and the pull of gravitation on the fragments. The Yellowstone rotted away on the north side, but it was hard granite and mountain-built quartzites on the south, toward the Tetons. Hot spring rotting, geyser erosion, acid waters, and sulfur decomposed the north country. The underground water head followed the easiest channels, and the canyon was the result. The canyon line encircles Mount Washburn, the old volcano, and conceivably is over an old crack concentric to the dome.

Water is a transporter, and cracking opens ways to the rotting agents. Only in rivulets and floods does water actually corrade, or grind, the bottoms of streams. In our spray and fern patterns there is analogy to rainfall springs on flat strata, but nine-tenths of the elements of erosion are left out: jointing, weathering, ice, faulting, gravitation, rotting down, quaking, solution, sliding, and last, spring water.

Erosion by sliding continues by wind action in desert mountains, and on volcanic cones under bombardment, and by rocks snapping under chill and sunshine on the moon. Creep of loose stuff is the greatest eroder on earth. Rainfall cloudbursts certainly help, especially where soil is not held together by a mat of roots.

The process of erosion is supposedly slow, as all geological processes are slow, if we neglect the possibility of such submarine landslips or supramarine upheavals as occurred at Yakutat in 1899. But even New England has floods, hurricanes, landslides, forest fires, and cloudbursts which are exclamation points on an otherwise sleepy history. And in the past it has had ice sheets, and subsidences beneath the sea.

In other words, the making of valleys and stream patterns for the map is accented occasionally, and the occasions may come in climatal waves unknown to us. The stream patterns in the Bad Lands, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, the Grand Canyon, and New England make very different maps. The rotting of the rock, limestone caverns, rainfall, faults, and sloping underground strata bearing spring water all influence these maps. What is erosion and what index is written on the land to say the Grand Canyon and tributaries are being carved downward faster than the Mystic River in Boston?

Ralph Stone tackled the Mystic River, and marked ledges and set stakes opposite the flood plain meanders. The idea was that ledges split by winter freezes, and that the meanders of a stream build on one side and cut on the other. Maps were made repeatedly, and the ledge cracks were measured in millimeters. Some movement was found, but a college year was not enough time. If we could combine as a motion picture, photographs from the air taken once a year for many years, doubtless the film would show that the stream meander pattern is migrating toward the sea like a wiggling snake.

Stone next made a model three inches thick in a tank of water, by sedimenting sixty-one very thin layers of marble dust, coal dust, clay, red lead, and sand. He tipped it up as an island and sprayed it in periods which lasted one to ninety-two hours, up to a total of 719 hours. A forking stream and its delta were formed in the lagoon of the tank. The stream cut a canyon with waterfalls, treelike branches, esplanades, and a flood plain. There were three principal hard white multiple strata layers in the model, separated by sand. The white layers made waterfalls and were eaten back to form the canyons.

When the cross section of the delta was sliced with a knife, it showed three white layers foreset at thirty degrees under the tank pool and separated by more sandy strata. The bottommost of these was the sediment of the top thick marble dust layer of the model as first eroded by the spray, and the top frontal layer of the leaf-shaped delta was the product of the erosion of the canyon bottom on the lowest of the white layers. This must happen in nature where one formation in reverse order is derived by river erosion undermining a stratified older pile of sediments.

We called this the Grand Canyon model, and it showed many features similar to those of South Dakota Bad Lands and the Colorado River drainage. It was strictly rainfall erosion and stratification soakage and seepage. The model surface sloped ten degrees, the high divide at the top had a backslope of forty-five degrees, and everything was sprayed for two months with special hose nozzles, making during part of each day a mistlike rainfall.

The steep backslope did not trench itself at all despite its steepness. This slope, on the contrary, absorbed moisture and carried the rainfall underground down the dip of the strata to add spring water to the main streams. The backslope was a “steep escarpment,” supposed in physical geography to migrate by trenching backward, but the rills never gained volume enough to cut into it. All the water volume acquired its grit for cutting from the large surfaces, which were gradually tilted in the direction of the rivers.

When the complete series of experiments on erosion and sediment was published, it showed that the treelike branching of rivers is dependent on underground water surfaces; that meanders on a flood plain are partly a bubbling-up process of flood-plain soakage; that when side tributaries form by undermining, the upstream branches cut off underground water from the downstream branches; and that when a country is tilted in one direction, there is a tendency to parallel streams, separated by intervals controlled by underground water areas reached by the undermining tracery of headwater springs.

This arborescence in a spray model is a regular and delicate adjustment, where a bunch of tributaries is not mere catchment of rainfall, but is the product of sheet flood in belts of underground water related to the tilt of the country. Arborescence of river drainage on a surface of flat strata, like the coastal plain of the southeastern United States, is a rhythmical pattern of exquisite design capable of reproduction and study in the laboratory. It is a mathematical forking and headward development dependent on volume of water, undermining impermeable strata along permeable ones. And after the “tree” map is formed, the bulb of branches and twigs and underground leaves of spring water holds all the downslope country in its “shadow,” so that no new rivers can form there. This is what makes our great maps of river systems. It is not haphazard. It is a vast ocean of underground water, with mountains of water and valleys of water.

A great lake marks an underground soakage water level. A riverbed marks an underground seepage topography. The sea of water inside a continent is just as much a map of hills and dales of water as the land is a map of the hills and valleys of geography. The water is dynamic, it is flowing. The land surface is dynamic and rain fed; it is creeping soils. Together, groundwater and rivers are melting down the landscape as a living thing. Man dams the water and uses the power of the erosion melting down the land.

When we went to Haystack Basin north of the Yellowstone Park, we found that all of the mountains surrounding it were audibly crumbling. Ultimately, the continent is all one thing: a falling body of rotten rock, ice, water, sand, boulders, and soils, self carved into valleys and mountains, always tumbling. And down below are the fault blocks, prisms of earth shell over the white hot core. And that also is eternally in motion, irrupting, earthquaking, lifting, falling, scraping, heating, cooling in waves through the ages. Man is very tiny, but if he listens he can hear the earth’s heartbeats.

At hot springs the water mantle meets the hot earth shell. So the geyser basins of Yellowstone, California, New Zealand, and Iceland are a hot part of the great erosion system of groundwater. This brings us to the next group of experiments, the making of artificial geysers.

Geysers as eroders show that the under earth is hot and is invaded by rainwater. In exceptional volcanic places the water is boiling hot. The Firehole River of the Yellowstone is carving down basins of solution faster than the regular geysers are building up siliceous sinter. Here is boiling-spring erosion by solution. It may be called the extreme thermal aspect of ordinary spring-water erosion. How does spring water erode? By bubbling up under the beds of rivers. The bubbling out of springs starts rivers, and flood rainfall starts soil gullies; land sculpture is the result.

We introduce geyser experiments here because boiling springs make drama out of ordinary springs, just as active volcanoes make drama out of buried volcanoes. Ordinary springs and buried lavas intruding invisibly are much more important and extensive than geysers and volcanoes. Most people never think of a spring as one of millions bubbling up the beds of brooks and rivers and sea bottoms.

Most people never think of volcanoes erupting—properly speaking, irrupting or inrupting—under Kansas or Brazil. Nobody denies those places are hot underground, but it all seems remote. Yet every spring is thermal if there is heat escaping through the rocks around it.

Geyser basins lower the country around them and leave hills in relief. The proportions of basins and hills depend upon the runoff of rotting and dissolving rock. The shape of a hill standing high, what Davis called a monadnock in New England, depends on its whole history, not on its hardness. Ascutney Mountain stands high as a lump because surrounding slates have rotted down. Mount Monadnock may stand high because the springs under the river pattern of cracks neglected it in the rotting and crunching of a continent.

Dynamic weight eternally falling makes low places. Hardness against weathering makes a mountain high only as a relic or residual. It is a node in the gigantic process of gravitation rotting and the spring squirting of groundwater. The water heats, rises, dissolves, siphons, springs up, and transports dirt. Underneath is a definitely heated earth crust.

Accordance of summit levels of mountains and hills as one looks across country does not have to represent an upraised plane surface. There is more undermining where the spring squirting is most voluminous. When spring squirting is equal, the opposed slopes of a valley adjust themselves. The tree line, the snow line, the rain line, and the wind line are definite levels of erosion. Under it all the rotting rock is falling toward the earth’s center, slowly, creakingly. The everlasting hills are not everlasting, they are everfalling; rocks, boulders, slopes, waters, gravels, sands, and muds. And adjustment to the atmosphere and groundwater surface is irresistible.

1. Experimental Geology Laboratory, Harvard University, 1900

2. Fountain at edge of lava lake, May 17, 1917

The notion of erosion pulling down hills to a flat plane near sea level is fascinating to geometry-minded people, but not to the mechanically minded. A flat plane near sea level in the Mississippi delta is where the river has swung right and left against valley walls, over its own flood plain. A flat plain, secured by ice sheets or planed off by encroaching wave action as land sinks is mechanically probable. In these circumstances we look for river or ice or wave-beach deposits. But an “almost plane” occasioned by the multiple action called erosion down to base level is to me the delightful dream of map students. If a landscape has been planed off, a machine router or planer did it. The great rivers of China have had a long time to bang back and forth against their confining boxes of rock and on top of their own mud.

To return to geyser-spring experiments, I built a simple quart flask surmounted by a four-foot glass tube. At the top the tube rose through a cork in the bottom of a two-foot pan. In the side of the cork of the flask was a second tube with a hose leading up to a reservoir bottle of water. The reservoir bottle could be raised or lowered. If the water in it was level with the pan, there was hydrostatic equilibrium: the pan a pool, the bottle a source, the flask and tube full. When we applied heat to the bottom of the flask, the water boiled, the pan overflowed, and some cold water from the bottle chilled the flask. The pan had become a boiling spring.

Next we lowered the reservoir bottle. The reduced head of water permitted no overflow at the pan, and steam bubbles accumulated in the four-foot upright tube. The boiling point was controlled by four feet of water pressure. If the bubble lift reduced this to three feet, there was a lower boiling point, the pressure was reduced by overflow above, and the whole flaskful boiled. The geyser tube became a regular geyser at intervals of a minute and a half, with eruptions enduring twenty seconds.

This was a miniature of Old Faithful in the Yellowstone. Old Faithful is bigger, its intervals average sixty-five minutes, and they range from thirty-one to eighty-one minutes. It jets up 150 feet for a period of four minutes. It throws out 3,000 barrels of water at each eruption. Our little machine threw up about a pint to a height of four feet.

We hear much about soaping geysers as an artificial stimulus. The apparatus in our laboratory showed the effect of soap right away. When some soap was put in the pan, the intervals of a minute and a half shortened to one minute. Soapsuds accumulated in the tube and depressed the water to the neck of the flask. The multiple bubbles, film against film, made the water system viscous. The myriads of tiny steam bubbles formed so fast that they shortened the lifting time for the column. If the height of the reservoir bottle was so adjusted that the geyser didn’t quite know whether it was a geyser or a boiling spring, the soap made the decision, and the thing went off with a bang.

This simple group of experiments makes springs very real. The Yellowstone explosive springs differ from other springs in having superheated steam from live lavas to heat them. The rock is cracked and the water is doing a job of solution and deposition. It deposits stout tough silica around some openings and builds them up against the head of groundwater, and they become geysers. It deposits lime dissolved off underlying limestone at Mammoth, and this makes sculptured terraces but not explosive springs because the temperatures are not so hot. In both lime and silica regions, blue-green algae, which love hot water, decoratively sculpture the pools.

Like a magician I exhibited the artificial geysers before New York and Boston science academies, and gave the summaries of the results of our geyser experiments, as follows: (1) Boiling springs are like other springs, controlled by the head or pressure of underground water in the hills. (2) Upstreaming of heated water and building up of silica (convection is the scientific jargon) may push the vent of a boiling spring even higher than its source (reversed head). (3) In this delicate condition, even rainfall or sinter building up or outburst at a lower level or clogging of a pipe may change spring to geyser or geyser to spring. There are many more boiling springs than there are geysers, and many more hot springs than there are boiling springs, and the word cold means nothing at all. There may be boiling springs under New York City if you go deep enough. That is why the riot of geyser apparatus is worth thinking about. (4) Irregular geysers overflow continually, regular geysers discharge their waters only during eruptions. Both are methods of feeding rivers, just like any other springs. But there is a lot of volcanic heat underground.

This brings up the question of how much a volcanic eruption is like a geyser. Geologists apply a glib word, phreatic, to Japan’s Bandai Volcano, which blew steam and rocks out of the side of a mountain and dammed a river. Hawaiian volcanoes squirt liquid basalt up a crack with flames and red fume and sulfur gas, and almost no steam at all. The answer seems to be that the Palisades of the Hudson may once have been Hawaiian lava eruptions and, further, that lava is still erupting there if you go down deep enough. New York doesn’t know about it, but it sensed it in 1886, when it felt the Charleston earthquake.

All that Catskill water supply of the great city is in cracks above the level of the deep lava, and extends out under Long Island Sound. If the Hudson fault fissure wiggled a little more than usual, and if the deep lava lowered and pulled down some of the Atlantic water, an eruption like Bandai is not impossible in the Watchung Ridge of New Jersey. This is not likely; but the globe has been through revolutions and cataclysms, and the Watchung explosions might start a new geyser basin. Something like that happened in northwest Wyoming in the Pliocene age, during 11 million years, next preceding the ice ages that began 2 million years ago. And the Yellowstone was the result. We shall see more volcano geysers.

Next, the making of deltas became a hobby in our laboratory, in connection with the old leaf deltas scattered on the New England landscape, partly covered with trees within the grounds of the country villas about Boston.

Delta deposits extend upstream, within the mould of the cavern within ice of the glacial period. Thus the map shows a snake-like ridge of gravel, ending in a maple-leaf flat, with lobate frontal slopes. These slopes were much steeper where the dump of the stream on the delta fell over the beach line at the lagoon or lake level in which the delta was built. This was like the delta shown in Stone’s erosion model.

Stone prospected the idea of torrential deltas in a tank, while E. W. Dorsey and I started a tank imitation of the glacial sand delta. In the glacier, the ice tunnel had been supplied with water by melting through the ice crevasses, just like tunnels seen in Switzerland, floored with sand ground up by the ice. There was thus a torrent pouring along inside an arched tunnel, the mouth of which emerged on a delta in a pool, with water surface either at the tunnel level or above it against the rounded front of the ice mass.

In imitation of a rounded bank of ice with a pool of water in front and with a subglacial meandering cave fed with sands and a torrent, an apparatus was built and supplied by a hose. A sheet of lead was bent in the form of the glacier surface, with an arched opening, and set in our tank. This fitted over a tunnel of sheet iron, soldered so as to meander in plan, and fitted at its upper end with pipe and hose connection. A sheet-iron funnel rose from the upper end of this artificial cavern, wherewith to supply different colored sands to the model subglacial river, represented by the hose jet and iron tunnel. The iron tunnel ended flush with the leaden arch.

The object of the experiments was, first, to set the leaden glacier in a pool of water in the laboratory tank. Next, to jet water through the tunnel, supply sediment in successive colors through the funnel, and let that accumulate on the bottom of the tunnel and in a delta in front of the artificial leaden glacier. The deltas and their sliced cross sections in different experiments represented the noted difference of kinds of sand supply or difference in water level of the pool. In one case the water level was below the ceiling of the tunnel where it emerged from the arch entrance. In another, it was above the cavern mouth, so that water of the cavern stream, debouching from the submerged cavern mouth in the lagoon, spurted up with its mud and made a half crater against the glacier front.

These experiments illuminate the gravel-quarry sections of Massachusetts. In those cuts in eskers (serpent ridges) and sand plains (glacial delta fans) were seen topset beds, or flood wash, or foreset beds at forty-five degrees which are the sublagoon frontal wash, and occasionally backset beds where cavern wash gushed upward.

So our cross sections, cut with a knife in the delta, and the winding cake extending upstream in the cavern showed topset, foreset, and backset strata after draining the tank and lifting out the apparatus. From the embryo delta the flood-plain beds overlap the earlier frontal, or foreset, beds. The frontal beds are always under the lagoon. The flood-plain beds (topset) were made by a meandering river course under the air. Always this plain is built at beach level as a wash fan shaped like a leaf, with the cavern stream bottom as the stem of the leaf.

New England has been covered with mountainous ice, miles high. Subglacial streams and subglacial clear ice caverns are abundantly found at the lower ends of all glaciers in the world. They merely represent the melting snow and ice in pulses of sunshine, snow at the source, ice in the course, crevasses and gravitation making water seep through. This water shapes a channel for itself and erodes a sewer system of scouring along the bottom of the subglacial valley. This grinds and melts the bottom ice into arched caverns; and the sediment builds up on the stream bottoms, eventually carving the roofs of the caverns into high arches or arcades. The subglacial caverns are self constructed drainage pipes.

The glacial stream is really a river flood cutting its valley. The ice river grinds and scrapes, and the water under the ice pipes and drains the melting. The ice carries chisels of broken rock. The enormous weight, in gliding plane layers of ice, flows in accordance with the crystal laws of snowflakes and ice crystals. The moraines, or debris fields, at the sides and on top and underneath the eroding ice jumble yield mud and sand and boulders. The torrent underneath removes the rubbish.

The delta in front follows laws of sedimentation. If there is no lake in front, the delta is a flat wash fan, or valley flood plain. All these things become clear to the student who makes a baby glacier out of tinware, sand, a tank, a hose, and a faucet.

I have spoken of cataclysms, or what early geologists called catastrophe, happening occasionally in the world of erosion and subterranean geysers. Such were the Yakutat crash and the Bandaisan explosion. But each glacier-period field, like an ice mountain over Europe and America, constituted a cataclysm lasting 500,000 years, and this happened four times even in the centuries of early man. The Mediterranean and the Great Lakes are offspring of such cataclysms. But Lyell carried the doctrine of uniformity to extremes; he thought that what man sees is what always happens. I do not believe Lyell ever realized that earth or sun might conceivably explode in a month of our time. Again, this is not likely.

The opposite of uniformitarianism is occasional catastrophic trigger. The process of erosion pulls the trigger for sudden deformation. Slow deformation pulls a trigger for eruption. Eruption triggers internal intrusions. The Frank Landslip; the Charleston, San Francisco, and Napier earthquakes; the Pelée eruption; and the Yakutat upheaval all created terrific surprises for geologists.

The gigantic intrusions through millions of years from the core of the earth, made of white hot star matter, percolating to surface volcano belts up 1,800 miles of permanent, primitive cracks, are mostly balanced by the crustal weight. This is the adjusting globe. But the intrusive mechanism, under tides in the rock and in the oceans, always in motion, pulls the trigger for the big geologic revolutions.

The very deep broken earth blocks shift, volcanism between them heats the surface, floods the surface with gas foam, and lifts areas of surface by heat swellings; and on the surface, what was a glacial period gives place to a volcanic period. The last of these was the Miocene Tertiary, with large-scale volcanic eruptions all over the world.

Comparing Boston with the Black Hills showed underground eruptions in the latter, for which a warping uplift pulled the trigger. These were the rock cisterns or lenses of porphyry injected among the strata. The time of this was Miocene or Eocene Tertiary, probably later than most of the volcanoes of the Yellowstone, farther west.

Boston, on the other hand, was making black basaltic dikes, probably identical with the volcanoes of the Berkshire Hills and New Haven, of the age of the big reptiles, 150 million years before the Black Hills injections. The trigger which pulled off the Boston eruptions was the Appalachian warping. That which fired off the Black Hills was the Laramie revolution that pushed up the Rocky Mountains.

The injection of lava lenses in the Black Hills was a form of deformation of strata which we experimented with in the laboratory. The layers of sandstone, limestone, and old ocean muds covering over the arch of these hills were injected by dikes or fissure fillings from below. How would injections behave?

With Ernest Howe as my associate, I arranged a square tank for sedimenting sand, plaster powder, coal dust, or marble dust in layers under water. Under it was an iron cylinder in which wax could be melted. A screw piston pushed the molten wax up to inclined or upright slots in the middle of the tank box. The water was drained off, and the hot wax was injected up into the strata. The tank sides were taken down, and hardened lenses of wax were sliced vertically with a hot knife to show what had happened to the strata by the process of wax intrusion.

In some of the experiments 300 pounds of shot were piled over a cloth layer on top of the strata to imitate the weight of natural sediments. This was before injection of the hot wax, and the result was a neat dome of deformed layers at the surface, a domical hill over a lens of wax inside. This hill was eroded with a spray of water to show what kind of radial valleys would form. Such radial streams were found in South Dakota, with infacing escarpments, around some of the dome hills made by laccoliths.

From the beginning it appeared that a lens of injection would form, that the strata would arch over a dome of wax. The arched strata stretched on the crest and the breaks gaped upward, while the side bends cracked gaping downward. It was there that the wax could break its way upward and make a volcano. Some nice little experimental volcanoes of wax-built cones and craters formed on top of the model.

As with all folded strata arched downward under weight, the cracks on the bend of a downward arch, or syncline, admit lava from below, whereas the cracks on the upward arch, or anticline, are held tight, closed by the weight of strata above. Thus an intrusive dome will not erupt through its crest, but through its sides.

The results of all these tests showed that rigid beds carried the arching force and that soft beds were most invaded and pushed aside by the wax. The steepness of curvature of arch varied with the load. An inclined pipe formed an irregular lens thickest away from the incline. In a hard bed ruptured on a downbend, concentric fractures around a dome let the lava up to higher strata.

On the crest of a hard bed the fractures are like the spokes of a wheel, but they do not make dikes; they yawn open upward. Liquid wax tended to spread as a thin sheet in soft layers of strata, stiffer wax tended to arch up in a steeper dome. Rapid injection made a higher and smaller dome than slow injection.

Compared with the arching up the whole long mountain oval of the entire Black Hills dome, with granite on the crest, this intrusion of wax only imitates the small domes of lava intrusion or injection, where the injection carries the energy or stress. Indeed, in nature, even the lava lenses are influenced by the buckling that is going on in the strata under stresses of crust warping. For the warping crust of the earth is always pulling the trigger and straining the strata. The lava rising from below seeks out the weak places and assists the buckling, as well as following the most incoherent mud or shale beds.

When it comes to the big oval of the whole Black Hills uplift—swollen up like the Rocky Mountains during millions of years and within which the lava injections were only an item—we are dealing with a push from below or an expansion that swelled up the pre-Cambrian ancient rocks as well as the later granites. Such swellings were doubtless made again and again in Massachusetts. There, also, we find lavas and granites and Red Beds and glacial boulders, older than the Appalachian Mountains, as well as younger. The younger Triassic lavas are definitely erupted between fault blocks.

All that our experiments showed was what melted stuff will do in strata under weight, when the force of melted stuff overcomes that pressure to find a place for itself, although the weight may be more or less lifted by big arching that is taking place on a big scale. The arching is bigger than the hydraulic or gas pressure squirting.

There is another possibility besides buckling. This is faulting, or movement of deep crust blocks the boundaries of which do not appear. The deep crust is a movable mosaic above the core, and this movement renews itself, now here, now there. Dutton shows that we may think of the Rocky Mountains this way all the way out to the Pacific coast. We may have the core fluids sucking down the blocks, the volcanic fluids pushing up the local strata. And the volcanic fluids in cracks are the degenerate gassy top remnants of the core fluids which man has never seen and which are 1,800 miles down.

The boundaries of the crust blocks do not appear because the whole first shell of the globe is buried under lavas and intrusions and crystals and mud, meaning by mud, countless dumpings of lakes and rivers and seas through 3,000 million years. Such is the kind of thinking started by making wax injections.

It will be seen from the experiments that whether we are imitating underground heat with a Bunsen burner to start a geyser, or overground cold with delta apparatus to simulate a glacier, we are dealing with erosion of the earth’s surface. Erosion started with the first attack on lava by the atmosphere or by sea water. Never was the pristine lava anything like the magma inside the globe; it snapped and chilled and oxidized. Whether we call it basalt or obsidian, it degenerated. Moreover, it degenerated in the outer crust when it loosed its gases, heated itself and the rock wall, found groundwater and free air, and started oxidation new to it. Thermal action is just as much concerned with erosion as is rainfall or snow. Therefore, whether injecting wax and swelling strata or imitating geysers and ripplemarks, we were experimenting with volcanoes, for the crust of the earth is fundamentally volcanic. For the purposes of this book these facts demand reiteration.

In what are called geosynclines, or earth sags, the great beds of strata are accumulated. They are the dirt washed from highlands into midland seas. They are strata of sandstone, mudstone, or limestone; thin films in comparison with the fire-made earth crust. It was the wrinkling of basin fills by expansion or end push that built Himalaya and Appalachia. The mountains are etched out of foldings and overthrusts and faults by rotting and water transport. Pressing the strata endways to wrinkle them is called mountain building, much better named strata wrinkling. The thickest of them reached twelve miles vertically, but what is that to the earth’s crust of 1,800 miles? The crust lifts and lowers fault blocks. The little strata basins expand with heat on their bottoms and get pulled and pushed by underground lava intrusions. Also they get squeezed by global contraction between crust blocks, and shoved up and down by the agelong wobbles. The biggest wobble was the downdrop of the great oceans over fault blocks when the crust first cracked and settled over the core. Those oceans have shifted and adjusted in waves of global action ever since. The crust has kept the earth a sphere while lavas erupted and weighted down the blocks. This block wobble extends into the innermost continents. Eruptions up the cracks migrated from the continental seas to the shores of the present oceans. They changed composition as they did so, because they changed from under-air eruptions to under-sea eruptions, fifteen pounds pressure to 600 atmospheres pressure. From erosion eruptions with enormous heat, to deep sea eruptions with enormous chilling and pressure. And the latter are the volcanoes of the present day, mostly concealed except for the islands and sea borders.

Meantime, the crust blocks continue to wobble up and down, and quakes continue to creak under the rock tides of sun and moon pulls. The creaks and wobbles are our big earthquakes, tidal waves, and eruptions. Such big accumulations of eruptions as the Cordillera or the Hawaiian Ridge is a terrific weight in a few million years. Both heaps have been at it since Miocene time, or for about 18 million years, banging down through the crust blocks on top of the core. Whether such balancing of heavy weights on top of the crust blocks is due to change of lava weights or sediment basins, six to twelve miles of rock vertically, the down squeeze and underflow is called by the Greek word isostasy. It means standing level and is a poor word because the earth’s crust never stands still. The blocks are eternally adjusting and creaking over a fluid core, the globe is whirling, the sun and moon are pulling, the volcanoes are erupting, and the solar system is shooting through space. Terra firma is never static. And our little atmospheric lives on top of it never stand still. We are hot, and we ourselves do a great deal of eroding.

This oration is introduction to the next series of Harvard experiments, which dealt with squeezing and wrinkling strata in imitation of the folds and faults of the Appalachian Mountains. Bailey Willis, at the Geological Survey, made a press of wax models of strata. A heavy oak piston was advanced by a screw crank. The models were waxes mixed with plaster for hard strata and waxes mixed with Venice turpentine for soft strata. They were cast to imitate actual successions of hard, thick limestones; less hard sandstones; soft mudstones; or slates. The piston advanced at a measured rate against one end of the model, the other end being a fixed box, the strata lying horizontally. The elongate Appalachian basin had a continent (the piston) to the east; a wide flat fill of limestones or sea bottom to the west (the box); and the deepest trough of pebbles, sands, and muds on the east, toward the rivers of the eroding continent of that ancient time. The heavy limestone tapered from the west into these thinner beds and made a stiff rib in their midst. The final result of their wrinkling was linear folds with axes north and south parallel to the trough, and close set at the east. The folds overturned toward the west, the overturns developing into overthrust fractures westward when the beds ruptured. Also, the folds became bigger, flatter, and wider apart westward under the deeper sea, the famous one being the Cincinnati arch.

The evidence in the middle eastern states is that the trough bottom sank as the heavy shore sediments were dumped by rivers into the sea. The west-central states received a wide flat of limestone. Uplift of the continent shallowed the ocean and pushed it, narrower, over to the great plains. So there were left a deep trough of weak beds, a massive limestone, and an overlap of continental wash across the uplifted later continent of the present time. The problems to be studied in Willis’ models were how folding would affect such a pile, what transmitted the wrinkling force, what started a single fold, and how soft and hard strata behaved under horizontal pressure.

He found that hard, thick layers of limestone transmitted the push farthest. That soft beds piled up on each other near the piston. That these beds showed beautiful overthrust faults inclined away from the piston. And that the start of individual folds was favored by very small initial bends in a transmitting layer. These downbends away from the continent would be made as the trough bottom sank through the ages. The nature of this sinking in upright slices of the bottom rock is probably downfaulting. Each vertical slice would make a step-bend as it sank.

The bottom of Willis’ box did not admit of down motion by underflow, nor did the piston pressure create an opposed horizontal force that might have come from the ocean area. In restraining up motion over the folds that formed, Willis piled bags of shot on top of the model to represent downweighting. The folding in the Appalachians was down at the bottom of the heap where things were hot and compressed, and heat could extend individual strata.

In our pressure chest we extended the Willis conception. We made two pistons at opposite ends of an oaken box, with thick plate glass panes at one side, so as to watch the folding. The two pistons would distribute the end pressure better and admit the possibility that all the pressure did not come from the continent. The bottom under the model was an inner box that could move down, hung on heavy spring balances. These could be screwed up to a pressure upward to compensate the load of shot. Thus the first fold could arch downward as well as upward. This imitated a possible lowered trough bottom. The piston rate of advance was controlled by metronome, one man at each screw.

For examples, models E, F, and G had four white and four black layers, all alike in substance, at fast, medium, and slow rates. The quickest was shortened one inch in five minutes. The slowest was one inch in an hour and three-quarters. The quick-squeeze model flexed smoothly, all folds seemed to flow, and the model held together compactly. The slow-squeeze model shortened the same amount, cracked in many places, was brittle, and did not hold together compactly. This appeared to prove that slow motion will fracture where quicker motion will hold strata intact, under otherwise identical conditions of substance, of folding and shortening, and of vertical confinement.

We verified Willis’ conclusions that stiff and thick beds transmit the pressure farthest and that overthrust tends to form in soft beds, which thicken near a piston. In one model we got overthrusts in opposite directions on opposite sides of the model along a single-fold axis, with a twist in between. While an experiment was in progress, the chest creaked occasionally, the equivalent of an earthquake. One model was cast to represent overlap of strata near shore, like a coastal plain. When squeezed, it made a group of overthrusts away from the piston acting as shore rock.

In burial of strata there is a possibility whereby they wrinkle, and wrinkle most in one direction, which piston pressure does not imitate. That is the heating by burial and expansion or lengthening of controlling layers. In a long basin like the Appalachians, the wrinkling under expansion across the greatest length is easiest, because the axis of stiffness is parallel to the long trough. Transitions off the coastal line from one sediment to the next—sand to mud, mud to lime—will be weaknesses to start bends when expansion pressure takes place under burial along the layers separately heated. These bends develop into wrinkles and the wrinkles, into propagated folds, with the axis parallel to the initial change of weaknesses. Expansion lengthwise on folds, once begun, may make long flat arches pitching in one direction. This heating by burial distributes the folding better and farther than pushing abutments, and makes initial bends. All bottom strata heat and expand in all directions. The direction of easiest yielding to a folding impulse is across the weak transition belts. After that the motion is taken up by linear folds and fractures in one direction.

The models, after continuous or intermittent squeezing, were removed from the chest and sliced with a hot wire for sectioning and photographing. In one, brittle, broken series of folds in a hard layer, the model was taken apart on that layer and the surface photographed. The crest of the folds showed jointing or regular cracks. One set paralleled the fold axes as would be expected; the other set crossed the slopes diagonally and in curves. These last indicated the strains of a twisting nature on a single layer between a downfold and an upfold.

What makes the end thrust, or piston push, in nature? According to the old idea, it was contraction of the inner earth by loss of heat. Willis wrote that the basin sank, isostasy or deep flow was at right angles to the length of the basin, and general contraction took effect by reason of the deep flow. The deep flow was toward the lighter continent, from which the sands were originally lost.

The recent notion that radioactivity heat is in the outer shell denies contraction of the inner earth. Furthermore, I do not believe in a shallow underlayer of lava fifty or less miles down and capable of flowing horizontally under shifting weight. I do believe in a deep underlayer of fluid 1,800 miles down, under a block-faulted crust. This fluid core adjusted itself to the ocean-bottom blocks originally, making the upright slices moving-down controllers of the Appalachian basin. There is no proof that sediment weight did it. It is more likely that igneous, or fire-made, lava, as the thick outer armor plate of the globe erupted in acts of intrusion, lubricated the vertical slices. Intrusions are under every sedimentary mountain range on earth. It is more likely that an agelong up of ridge fault blocks and a down of the basin fault blocks decided where the central continental basin should be, all of it well within the permanent side ridges of North America. For this was a continental mediterranean sea, and the warping of its highland of Philadelphia and its basin of Cincinnati was a mere episode in the 2,000 million year history of Atlantic and Pacific borders of the continent. The sinking of the intracontinental sea, relative to the staying up of the highlands, was a wave in the history of globe and core. Erosion and deposition were results, not causes. They were results of the volcanic history of the ever moving active mosaic of the globe. The permanent North America remained high, relative to Atlantic and Pacific deeps.

The folding of the sediments merges into intrusions of magma in the southern Appalachians. Here arose the granite problem on a tremendous scale, which is repeated in our Ascutney Mountain in Vermont. What it was doing under the bottom of those vast fields of limestone from Ohio to Illinois we have no idea. No more do we know what is doing under the vast fields of lime and red ooze at the present bottoms of the deep oceans. But we do know that fire-made rock squirts up under all sea-laid sediments which anyone has ever studied on islands or continents. This fire-made rock, solidified, has thickness and a bottom. We do not know its thickness nor its bottom. We do know that under it are big cracks 2,000 miles long rupturing it into volcano systems. The conclusion is that the globe is mantled by a layer of igneous matter which has spouted up cracks since more than 3,000 million years ago. How did this matter migrate by new intrusions, to pull, push, heat, and wrinkle through 500 million years the dirt accumulated in shallow Appalachian trenches from Alabama to Indiana? We do not know.

The last of the Harvard experiments that I took part in concerned melting up powders of basaltic minerals and rocks, letting them cool down gradually, and then sectioning them for the polarizing microscope to see how they resembled lavas. V. F. Marsters of the University of Indiana helped me. Based on the European work of Doelter, Fouqué, Michel-Lévy, and others, we used a French furnace with gas flame blast and small crucibles of diatomaceous earth mixed with clay. The specimen powders of crushed natural basalts, or mixtures of pyroxene, feldspar and olivine, were kept glowing for forty to 150 hours, and cooled either rapidly or slowly. The belief in those days was that slow cooling was the main control of coarse crystallization. Quick or slow cooling certainly does produce these effects in lava flows.

From quick cooling, we generally got radial bunches of crystals or spherulites, in a glassy groundmass. From slow cooling, we got diabase structure or coarser crystallization, with some openwork hollow crystals. And there were little grains of magnetite and spinel. Much time was wasted on furnace safety and methods, and on fire-punctured crucibles of platinum, carbon, and graphite.

Nothing had been learned in 1900 about stirring, nor about gas as an ingredient in basalt. It was not until years later, at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, that Emerson proved that aa lava was made by stirring a crucible. Aa is crystalline. Emerson got glassy lava by quiet melting. No one has yet subjected lava to hydrogen blasts like those of a Bessemer furnace, nor to other gases. There is a big field here for imitating Mauna Loa and Etna fountains, and for critical petrography of artificial basalts. Modern work has been concerned with physical chemistry of limited mineral systems. So far as I know, no one has mathematically synthesized natural rocks as an object in natural history since the work of Carl Barus for the U. S. Geological Survey in the nineties.

Chapter III
Expedition Decade

“The voice of thy thunder

was in the whirlwind.”

Whereas small scale experiments in the laboratory helped me to think about the details of nature’s experiments, there remained the need to measure nature itself. The deep lavas of South Dakota, squeezing among shale beds, posed many questions. What penetrating of strata goes on under Vesuvius? Does lava inrush tilt or lift the ground? Does this measure up to eruptions in or from craters? Cannot experiments with craters themselves be made by dwelling there? Certainly the progress of lavas can be measured as they flow forth.

The decade following my mud-pie experiments saw me assistant professor at Harvard and head professor of the geological department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These appointments were under Presidents Eliot, Pritchett, and Maclaurin. From 1901 to 1910 I continued to serve the Geological Survey, writing up back reports. Then nature took a hand. Along came earthquakes and eruptions in Guatemala, a terrific disaster in the West Indies, expeditions to the Caribbees, Italy, the Aleutian Islands, Japan, Hawaii, and Central America, another in north Japan, and disastrous earthquakes at San Francisco, Valparaiso, Messina, and Costa Rica. The destruction of St. Pierre in Martinique set the stage for field work on volcanoes and earthquakes, work which I was to continue for a half century.

When the evening papers of May 8, 1902, announced the sudden annihilation of 26,000 people that morning at 8 o’clock at St. Pierre, Martinique, I went immediately to President Eliot. Knowing that I had been urging field study of volcanoes, he agreed that I ought to go to St. Pierre and wired Secretary of the Navy, William H. Moody, to arrange for transportation. Immediate financial support came to me from Alexander Agassiz, the National Geographic Society, and numerous friends; and my Harvard colleagues agreed to give my lectures.

I reported to the training ship Dixie in Brooklyn, where I found Captain Robert Berry, a stalwart Virginian, in command of a cadet crew. On board were I. C. Russell of Michigan, author of “Volcanoes of North America”; E. O. Hovey of the American Museum; Curtis, the maker of topographic models; R. T. Hill of the Geological Survey, and expert on Caribbean lands; and numerous other scientists, and newspaper correspondents.

The voyage to the West Indies was unique. On the navy cruiser were stores of food, tents, clothing, and medical supplies for the refugees and an oddly assorted passenger list; all assembled because of warfare against mankind by two utterly unknown volcanoes, Soufrière on the British island of St. Vincent, and Pelée at the north end of the French colony of Martinique. Geologists gave lectures to the crew on deck; and in turn, we learned about naval discipline and efficiency.

When we arrived at Fort de France, thirteen days after the terrific disaster, we were transported at once to St. Pierre on the naval tug Potomac. We landed and walked through the ruined sugar city, the streets puddled with molasses and rum. Thousands of dead were buried underfoot amid the rubble, for the day before our visit, there had been a second blast from Pelée, the 4,000 foot volcano smoking four miles away. This had thrown down what roofs remained after the first explosion.

We arrived opposite St. Pierre May 21, 1902, and saw a smoking, dusty line of ruins along the shore. Before we landed we were warned that if the tug’s whistle should blow we were to make for the boats. The dusty hill lay on our left like a gray snow landscape, not at all like a cone. The crater was a gorge in an ordinary mountain under clouds.

We wandered through the dreary ruin and found masonry completely destroyed and no visible large volcanic fragments. The streets were full of rubble, and everything was coated with green-gray powder. Roofs were gone, an occasional timber was burning, and bodies were still numerous in the shells of houses. We saw a baby in an iron cradle, a man face down in a tank, and a big man on his back in a deep baker’s oven. His flesh was shriveled and drawn away from his joints by heat. Elsewhere eight or ten bodies were crowded at the foot of a cliff.

3. Explosion cloud rising from Halemaumau during explosive eruption, May 13, 1924

4. Crag in lava lake, January 23, 1918

The end of the town toward the volcano, all backed by cliffs, was deeply buried under gravel, but the southern end had a covering of only a foot or two of sand. The second explosion was greater than the first one, demolishing third storeys and the second belfry of the cathedral. The beautiful bells “whose soft liquid notes used to ring across the bay with touching cadence at the Angelus hour” lay tumbled in rubbish, splinters, and steaming vapors; their ancient embossed inscriptions half buried in dust.

The bodies were mostly shriveled to a crisp from the second eruption, for earlier the bodies had not been much altered. The odor was a haunting one that returned in dreams—of foundry, steam, sulfur matches, and burnt stuff, and every now and then a whiff of roast, decayed flesh that was horrible. It was impossible to realize that this Pompeii had been a thriving French town two weeks before. Not a roof was left, and scarcely a timber; steam came through little holes in the wet brown sand, and a sickening whiff showed whence it came.

It was hard to distinguish where streets had been. Everything was buried under fallen walls of cobblestone and pink plaster and tiles, including 20,000 bodies. A New England town would have blown away as white ashes before the giant blowpipe acting on the flame of burning rum.

I looked toward the gray old volcano, with shrouded summit. The landscape was dusty, like old statuary. Mountain slope and cliff were denuded of trees. An overturned factory boiler had holes punctured by flying stones. A circular marble fountain basin was chipped away on the volcano side by bombardment. Old cannon used as mooring posts at the quay had been uprooted violently. The green landscape ended abruptly at the city along a sharp line, with coconut palms half green, half brown. There was no motion except steam jets on Pelée’s slopes.

Suddenly I wondered what those steam vents were doing. At first there had been one or two along the sea front; but now there were eight, ten, twenty, spurting high and scattered all over the volcano. A physician, Dr. Church, was standing near me, and we agreed that we disliked the outlook. Now there were forty jets, like so many ghostly locomotives run out from the Pelée roundhouse. Meanwhile, white-coated officers and scientists were scattered about in groups under the cliffs, some out of sight of Mount Pelée.

We looked toward the USS Potomac; she had seen the steam, and her own white steam presaged quick, repeated toots of her fog horn. Pellmell the passengers came tumbling to the landing. The sailors had no sooner started the boats than two more white-coated figures appeared, and we had to put back for them. The mountain looked as though it were rifting in a hundred places preparatory to an outburst, and there were many stories of new craters forming. What we saw was actually the product of a smart rain shower, falling on red hot dry gravel; but we were to learn later about rain rill explosion. Wherever a stream rill runs down to such contact, a jet of steam forms at once.

The main water gorge of the Pelée crater was blown clear of clouds as we steamed past, and we saw a cup under the summit amphitheater where a lake had been, with a pile of scaly looking hot boulders in its midst steaming violently. This crater extended into a deep gulch to the ocean, whence had come a disastrous mud flood on May 5 which buried a sugar mill. This had happened three days before the destruction of St. Pierre. Water preceded steam. The cracks under the gulch undoubtedly dipped away from the city, and from an unknown chasm athwart the gulch line ejected water and superheated steam toward the city, like a jet from a hose. This happened on May 8. The ejected material had been in dry steam, and red hot, accounting for early reports of lava at night.

I saw molten rock five weeks after the Potomac trip, when the crater cone was above the rim of the gorge, apparently large fragments of brown angular material resting on finer gravel. Cauliflower clouds of reddish dust spurted up the bed of the gulch below every half hour, and migrated down the gulch. This was followed by a low growl, perhaps from avalanches. The basin widened during the month, and the dome gained in height and breadth. A bright incandescent crack at night was seen to cross the heap obliquely. A sudden increase of glow was followed by a rumbling, as though the dome were heaving. Breadcrust bombs of andesite, cracked on their surface in deep gashes, and picked up on the mountain at both Pelée and Soufrière were pieces of the internal lava.

A chance clearing of the whole dome came two months after the obliteration of St. Pierre. This we photographed, when brown dust was rising, and steam jets appeared southeast on the dome and in the gulch. On top was an extraordinary spine, shaped like a shark fin, with steep escarpment to the east, curved and smooth and scraped to the west, pushed up and out of a central rupture of the dome. It was like paste from a tube, a hard central pencil of lava that had been shoved up by the expansive force within. Jagged surfaces of breaking showed on the vertical east cliff and long, smooth, arched striations of scrape appeared on the rounded west profile of the protuberance. Other hornlike projections showed on the dome. The summit spine was 200 feet above the surface of the heap.

On July 6, 1902, came the first report of the famous Pelée spine. It crumbled in August, and a year later a new spine, facing in the opposite direction, reached a height of 1,000 feet. It was a central tongue of the semisolid lava of the dome, sufficiently plastic to be urged out by forces within. Otherwise the dome was a nearly solid extrusion covered with fallen bombs. This was the magma, or lava, of the Pelée-Soufrière eruptions. Dike ribs extended radially from the spine athwart the dome. I published an erroneous explanation that the dome of boulders consisted of old fragments melted by a superblast and was not true lava. I was so far right, however, as to anticipate the gas-heat theory and melting of all volcanism.

The direct crisis of these Carib islands in 1902 was introduced by Soufrière Volcano on St. Vincent, 100 miles south of Martinique, at 1 p.m. on May 7, nineteen hours before the St. Pierre disaster. Soufrière exploded, as the common saying is, through a crater lake pit southwest of its 4,000-foot summit, the crater edge being 3,500 feet high. It is notable how many volcanoes are 4,000 feet high, and how many have crater pits, not at the top, but along a rift below the peak. Just this was the case of Pelée, just this characterizes the calderas of Kilauea and Mauna Loa. A dozen other volcanoes could be named where the vents are through the flank of the heap.

Hovey, Curtis, and I were taken by the Dixie to St. Vincent, where the hospitable English colonists provided us with houses at the base of Soufrière, and with servants and horses; and the Government supply steamer took us around the island. We made the ascent of Soufrière to the edge of the great crater and looked down at boiling waters far below, green and muddy, and sending up a column of steam on one wall.

We three Americans guided by T. M. MacDonald, a Scottish planter, made the first ascent after the fearful eruptions of May 7 and 18. Leaving our quarters at Chateau Belair, we climbed on foot from the southwest base, with six stalwart negroes carrying instruments, water, and food. In the ruins of Wallibu sugar mill we encountered a wild-eyed East Indian coolie and his helpers looting sugar.

The Wallibu River received the brunt of the heavy, dry, red hot, gravel of the eruptions, drifted like snow and crusted with wet mud. Water supplied by the river broke its way into the eighty feet of incandescent fill of the valley. Instantly a steam explosion was hurled up in white volutes, and the river dammed its own channel with the stone shower from upblasts. This forced its own waters into fresh hot cinder and so maintained explosive action. One such exploding river sent up a column three quarters of a mile high, indescribably majestic, causing the natives to report new craters. A shower of mud and sand fell on our party.

The old road crossing Soufrière mountain was destroyed, the river flats were deeply trenched, and difficult ridges and hollows were encountered at every step. The gulches were deepened into gorges, the slopes above furrowed with a feathery rill drainage pattern. Each spur between gulches was like a very steep roof, with a smooth pathway uphill along the watershed. This made progress easier. Big tree stumps of Ficus jutted ragged through the hardened mud, the branches charred and sharpened by sand blast.

A whirl of volcanic sand made an unpleasant stinging shower of dust, and sulfuretted hydrogen smelled of rotten eggs. But near the summit the air was fresh and the sunshine bright. A rain would have made the mud slippery and perilous, for the gulch slopes were practically cliffs. Finally we did come to mud clots, resembling a cattle wallow, knee deep and sticky. Large blocks of rock two feet across lay on the surface, flung-out pieces of the old crater walls; and there were some bombs of new lava.

After three hours we assembled at the rim of the old crater, which before the outbreak had been full of a high crater lake. Suddenly we came to an immense chasm almost circular, then the profile of a black precipice falling away 2,000 feet; and up its face we saw a silent steam column purling away in billows. The bottom was a green pool of boiling water, muddied by springs from the wall; and a hundred tails of white steam joined the column on the wall.

The inner walls showed horizontal bands of old lava, and intrusions both in lens shape and as dikes. There were red brown puddingstones made up of fragments. A funnel-shaped intrusion looked like the diagram cross section of a volcano, making a perfect T of gray lava, like a mushroom. A large fissure, filling west, rose from bottom to top. A northern rocky horseshoe rim, or somma, at the top made the peak of St. Vincent. The crater lip was a mile wide and the interior a half mile deep; and the green puddle at the bottom was 1,200 feet across. The base of the wall column sputtered fiercely and sent up spurts of black mud and rock fragments. The lake level was 1,100 feet above the ocean, 800 feet lower than before the eruption; and the pool was shallow, with mud flats and islets. We operated cameras, compass, and sketch books; paced off a base line; and noted that the northwest corner of the crater had been blown away to leave a big notch.

When we returned to Chateau Belair, the negro peasant women brought out their children to gaze at us, the godlike men who had dared the crater. Mr. MacDonald had to steer us through the crowd, and we felt like the twelve apostles after a miracle.

The Soufrière eruption during the first week of May was more voluminous and violent than that of Pelée, for Pelée was concentrated on one target. Soufrière wrought havoc east and west, whereas Pelée was in a sector southwest of the mountain. They were equally devastating, however, and both made downblasts of superheated steam and gravels. Scalding dust killed people, but so did water waves, conflagration, steam, stones, drowning, and burial.

Soufrière’s dust fall was reported all the way to Trinidad and Barbados; and from ships east and southeast, directly against the trade winds, from 100 to 900 miles away. The dust column penetrated the antitrades of the upper atmosphere. Sounds were loud 150 miles away, but not heard close to the mountains. In the red hot gravel were innumerable landslides, river waters rushed into the gravel and made false eruptions, and shore cliffs collapsed.

No lava, except as fragments, appeared in St. Vincent, whereas it rose as a crateral heap in Pelée. Floods of rivers radial to the volcanoes appeared both before and after the first eruptions, and scientists erroneously attributed them to cloudburst rains. Later, exact descriptions by natives showed that the sources were hot waters gushing out in places where there was no rain.

A succession of eruptions at increasing intervals from May to December actuated both volcanoes. In succeeding years, explosions dwindled; but over Pelée’s crater rose a mighty dome and spine of stiff quartz-basalt lava, like ointment from a tube.

There was, on Pelée, a splitting of the bottom of the long crater gulch. Cauliflower steam volutes charged with dust gushed up the cracks, hard-edged in profile down near the shore, soft and diffuse near the crater. Scalding waters in the gulch bottom carried mud. The mountain was cracking open along radial gulches, and squirting up steam and geysers, but this all concealed itself with sediment. Nobody ever saw the cracks open. The migrating steam clouds charged with gravel were called glow clouds and were believed to “flow” as gas fluids from the crater.

An elucidation of all this mystery came many years later, after a thorough study of all reports. The glow clouds, which were at first confused with the gigantic blasts that had destroyed the city, were gradually explained. It became apparent that radial cracks are ancient characters of lava domes, and that lava domes lie under heaps of agglomerate. Pelée and Soufrière are heaps of agglomerate. Kilauea and Mauna Loa are lava domes. Vesuvius is an intermediate type of volcano.

I remained in the field from May to July, returned to Mount Pelée, cruised through the northern Caribbee Islands, and went to the bottom of the deep crater of Mount Misery, on St. Kitts. My guides on St. Kitts were two colored men, Johnny Eddy and Samuel Jim. In the crater we found steam and sulfur and a rotten-egg smell, on the bank of a cold crater lake. We descended by seemingly vertical cliffs covered with roots. This was a typical fumarole, or solfatara, one of the unsatisfactory characteristics of craters. We collected specimens and took snapshots, wondered how often such places change suddenly, and knew hydrogen sulfide gas only by the smell. It all jibed with what I was later to discover in Hawaii; that the only way to know a crater is to live with it, and that gases can melt lava.

As I look back on the Martinique expedition, I know what a crucial point in my life it was and that it was the human contacts, not field adventures, which inspired me. Gradually I realized that the killing of thousands of persons by subterranean machinery totally unknown to geologists and then unexplainable was worthy of a life work.

The story of Rita Stokes made a tremendous impression on me. In Barbados hospital I talked with this young white girl and her colored nurse, Clara King, who had been passengers on the SS Roraima which was at St. Pierre when the city was destroyed. When I saw them they were swathed in bandages. Clara’s burns were severe on knee, arm, and hand. Rita’s were on her head, hands, and arms, and one seriously disfigured ear. Both were somewhat injured for life. Mrs. Stokes, a boy, and a baby girl in the cabin with them had been killed. All saw the adjacent mountain sending up puffs, as the ship lay at anchor off the St. Pierre waterfront on the morning of May 8, but they were reassured by the ship’s officers.

Suddenly the steward rushed by shouting, “Close the cabin door, the volcano is coming!” Mrs. Stokes slammed the door just before a terrific explosion came which nearly burst the ear drums. The vessel was lifted high and sank down, and all were thrown off their feet by the shock, and huddled crouching in one corner of the little cabin. Scalding moist ashes poured in through a broken skylight in inky darkness. Next came suffocation, relieved by the door bursting open and air rushing in.

When a little daylight came back, Mrs. Stokes and the little boy were plastered black with hot mud, the baby girl was dying, and the nurse and Rita were in great agony. A heap of scorching mud had collected on one corner of the floor, and as the young girl put her hand down to raise herself, her arm plunged to the elbow in scalding sand. They were all taken out to the deck where mother, boy, and baby died. The ship was on fire, and the nearby city was a mass of roaring flames. More ashes fell and scalded the victims. Curiously, third degree burns were left on flesh, through underclothing not burned at all.

Clara said that the mountain appeared gray with smoke rolling west, that the weather was very calm, and that the dust smelled like gunpowder. She saw no flames during the blast and did not know what set fire to the steamer. The fires probably came from the city. Ashes came in sputtering splashes like “moist marl.” No rocks fell and the grit in cabin and on burns was wet sand. Before the blast there had been falling dust but, according to Clara, no difficulty in breathing. The sun was brownish red.

The bow of the ship was pointed seaward, and the vessel heeled over left, then right. The stern, toward the conflagration, caught fire first, the bow later. There was no rumbling, only shock and rattling thunder all at once, no noise before or after. The only people Clara King saw toward the shore were some men on a raft.

I wrote President Eliot and the American Relief Committee about the case of Rita Stokes, half American and the only white woman saved in St. Pierre. And I rejoiced to learn from her guardian and uncle, J. E. Croney of Barbados, that she was provided for. The sum of $450 was sent to the committee, and $6,000 in trust was set aside for her. She was never separated from her devoted nurse, Clara King.

Apart from the experiences of the wounded, I found much to contemplate in the findings of numerous geologists; in the accounts of doctors, sailors, naval officers, resident government men, the local newspapers, and photographers; in the specimens we collected; and in the work of great newspaper and magazine correspondents.

The facts and photographs we collected were baffling. They did not correspond with the text books. Two volcanoes a hundred miles apart suddenly spouted death downward. Obviously they were connected along the island chain, with ocean to the east and ocean to the west. Telegraph cables were broken. Why? That which lay under the ocean was totally unknown, both events and topography. The biggest part of these volcanoes was submarine.

Earthquakes at Pelée were relatively small but often continuous. Tidal waves were local and accompanied by downblasts of steam. The downblasts were at first supposed to be due to fallen avalanches from the upblasts. Then it appeared they were really sloping jets from concealed holes or cracks in the gulches, with inclined orifices amid the blocks of a cracked-up mountain. For at Pelée the blast that destroyed St. Pierre shot from the crater gulch in cascades of water and steam, while observers on high ground saw the horizon, or clear sky, over the crater.

The speed of the blast was six miles in two minutes, or 180 miles per hour. This was different from the glow clouds in the later months, migrating slowly along cracks in the gulch bottom.

Man’s perception of speed relative to himself has nothing to do with actual speeds. It may be argued that a miniature volcano erupts faster than a big volcanic system, but not if the whole terrestrial plexus of systems is taken into account. An eruption of Mauna Loa is a very slow affair, in comparison with the 10,000 underground squirtings of lava in cracks totally unperceived, except as tremors on seismograph.

Pelée’s eruption was like turning on a hose. A structural valve or orifice, suddenly opened by underground heaving of the mountain block and letting out steam and mud, appears to be the only reasonable explanation of what happened. And the only agents possible were glowing stiff lava heating boiling water underground. Both of these were later identified.

Grove Karl Gilbert of the U.S. Geological Survey, who had criticized favorably my manuscript on the Black Hills intrusive lavas, wrote me not to drop the enigma of Mount Pelée, because he found the published reports unsatisfying. In 1949, forty-seven years after the disaster, I published “Steam blast eruptions,” dealing with Pelée. In the interim I studied many volcanoes.

Alexander Agassiz, who had been urging me to do a memoir on volcanoes, financed a trip to Vesuvius when it exploded and poured out lava in 1906. Ottajano northeast of Vesuvius was demolished by jets of gravel and stones; and Boscotrecase at the south was invaded by black streams of heavy, sprouting, bouldery slag. Here was a change of habit, from heaping up lavas for thirty-four years, to collapse, internal avalanching, and pure steam explosion accompanied by remnants of stirred lava flow.

Why thirty-four years? A third of a century? Three times the sunspot interval? The previous steamblast explosion of Vesuvius before 1906 had been in 1872. In the case of Mount Pelée and Soufrière the intervals since past explosions had been fifty-one years and ninety years. But it should be pointed out that the Carib volcanoes had two years of terrifying rumblings, odors, and quakes just before 1902. Groundwater exists in large volume under all three volcanoes. Soufrière, Pelée and Vesuvius all began the steamblasts with collapsing craters, that is, with internal lava going down into the bowels of the earth. The lava usually showed in Vesuvius, whereas at Pelée and Soufrière it merely made fumaroles, or gas vents. Man, a mere microbe, could make nothing of hot sulfurous cracks.

On April 25 the electric train slowly pushed us up as far as the observatory station, beyond which all was destroyed. Outside Naples the fields were covered with two inches of gray-green dust, and pines and palms were loaded with a two or three foot drift of sand. Near the observatory a heavy six-inch mantle of sand and dust buried the lava fields. The Vesuvian cone was covered with straight sand slides, whitish gray, which occasionally slipped downward. The landscape was shrouded in drifts of white ashes revealing obscurely the slaggy contortions of lava beneath. Pure white steam boiled up from the cavity in the peak, surrounded by an older rain cloud, like a hat on the volcano’s crown.

My companions—Dr. Tempest Anderson and Messrs. Yeld and Brigg—were all from Yorkshire. We started the ascent of the twenty-nine degree slope in a strong west wind. The steam settled down on the summit, than alternated with clear spells. We followed the west profile of the cone straight up, noting how the funicular rails were twisted by landslides. Everything was covered with pebbles, sand, and dust, with here and there large fragments up to five feet across. We found solid footing on the radial elevations of either scoured old lava or packed fragments. The gullies were filled with deep sand.

The rim we could see ahead was the edge of the crater itself. The abruptness of the fall off, when we finally came to it, was startling in the extreme. The wind was pelting our necks with stinging sand grains which, incidentally, were ruinous to my new Kodak. Only occasionally did sunshine sift through the mixture of sand, steam, and cloud. We could make out an inward slope of thirty-five degrees, terminated 100 feet below by a jutting, fuming precipice. The circular curvature of the crater was embayed. The only noise was the howling wind. We could not see the opposite side of the collapsed cauldron a half mile across. The summit was 4,000 feet above sea level by aneroid measure, 350 feet lower than before the eruption. There was a great notch northeast toward Ottajano where thousands of tons of gravel were hurled clear over the top of Monte Somma, the encircling old ridge. The east-west diameter was left much greater than that of the north-south. The radial ridges and gullies were like a corrugated roof, and sand made a flattened angle of scree at the base of the scoured cone. The corrugations were not rain erosion, but were made by backfallen debris sliding. I got some photographs and Mr. Perret gave me others.

The big thing was the line of mountain blocks of earth crust. In Italy it is made up of Ischia, Pozzuoli, Vesuvius, Lipari, and Etna, whereas the Carribbee line is made up of Mount Misery, Montserrat, Guadeloupe, Dominica, Martinique, and St. Vincent. Such a line of broken earth blocks is a volcanic system. Hundreds of miles long, it is never quiet. A single place seems quiet because superficially we are totally unconscious of the other places. A microbe on the scalp knows nothing of the skin of the toes. Men are mere microbes on the skin of shore, sea, and island. And they are remote from any consciousness of sea bottom.

Vast distances and long intervals are writing records, but man does not measure them. He measures civilization, wars, and dynasties, not the adventures of the ground he dwells upon. Ground he considers static. Actually it is intensely dynamic. Occasionally it explodes and man is destroyed. Earth history and volcanic systems make wars look very small.

The tremendous accumulations of broken rocks over lava beds on the cone of Vesuvius, and on all the Caribbee Islands, recall the breccias, or volcanic conglomerates, of the Yellowstone and of the High Plateaus of Utah. Floods of basalt alternate with vast falls or outwashes of volcanic gravel. Avalanches, landslides, torrents, floods—call them what you will—cover immense areas of the Cordillera. Vesuvius and Pelée pile up cones, but the Caribbees and Italy are also heaped with agglomerates. Erosion destroys cones, but erosion makes agglomerations or valley fills of rocks and mud. This is the history of every volcanic system on the globe. Stübel discovered smooth basalt domes like Mauna Loa under every volcanic system.

In 1904 Vesuvius had vented a lava flow which stopped in September, and its cone was sharp, with only a little crater and inner conelet on top. In 1905 lava had flowed from a northwest split. On April 4, 1906, a splendid black cauliflower cloud arose. The northwest flow stopped and a southern radial rift made lava mouths progress 500, 1,800, and 2,400 feet below the top, more than halfway down the mountain. From the lower mouth came glassy pahoehoe, or smooth destructive streams intensely incandescent and liquid, quickly cooling to aa, or sprouting rough fudge, black crusts, and clinker. The molten porridge flowed as a snaky avalanche into the masonry village of Boscotrecase.

On April 7, at the crater, a column of boulder-laden steam shot up four miles, snapping with lightning. New lava mouths sent forking snakes crushing and swallowing parts of the village. A graveyard was neatly filled within its masonry wall, showing that internally the rocky torrent was a liquid.

Meantime trajectories like those of a hose sent falls of gravel for miles, to Ottajano on the opposite side of the mountain. These also came from the central crater. On the west flank, at the observatory, the house was rocking, and heavy stones forced its occupants to retreat. Matteucci and his staff went halfway down the cone, to return next day. Explosions dwindled during the next fortnight, though one day an adverse wind from the crater carried carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide almost asphyxiating some persons. Thereafter cauliflower clouds of white steam arose and the noise of big avalanches was heard.

The clinker field that invaded Boscatrecase was 16 feet thick, and houses were cut in two by a slaggy torrent. In Ottajano, on the opposite side of the mountain, flat tile roofs collapsed, buried under three feet of heavy gravel, some of it the size of an apple. Nearer the crater, boulders five feet in diameter were thrown a mile. The volcano was probably blocked inside by welling lava on the Boscotrecase side, which caused it to vomit steam and earthy avalanche material obliquely outward on the opposite, Ottajano, side.

The Italians have a word, sprofondimento, which means to make profound by insucking, that expresses what happened. This plexus of uprush of slag and inrush of avalanche, against a water-steam geyser, both happening at once, was very different from the quiet outpouring of lava during the preceding years. It definitely meant rupture of earth blocks, deep escape of that lava probably at the underocean part of the radial cracks, and deep entrance of spring water into incandescent vacated chambers. It meant a rupture crisis, collapsing the peak, and a new geyser quite unrecognized. The eruption ended when the slag pressure was relieved, the mountain blocks had settled, and the frozen slag had shut off groundwater. The remaining lava entered into decades of deep accumulation and gas bubbling, the solfataric phase. That which ended the thirty-year upbuilding was probably downward pressure due to weight of surface heaping of the cone. Cracking released water inward.

The next thirty-eight years were to culminate in a similar crisis for Vesuvius which lasted ten days, and again its peak collapsed. This was in March 1944, when our American troops entered Naples. It is interesting that these culminations have been from a third to a half century apart, but the meaning of intervals can only be really understood when volcanoes like Etna, Stromboli, and Vesuvius are grouped together. The same thing is true of Kilauea and Mauna Loa, and of Pelée and St. Vincent. Ponte reports the eruptions of Etna as ten years apart, similar to the sunspot interval; and Perret notes a ten-year interval for the smaller eruptions of Vesuvius. We measured an eleven-year interval for Hawaii, with culminations close to the minimum of sunspots. A culmination is when lava goes down and keeps quiet, or when sunspot numbers go down and remain few. No one knows why, or of any connecting cause.

Three eleven-year culminations make a third of a century, when at Kilauea and Vesuvius, something bigger happens. Sunspots have numbered a suspiciously similar curve at corresponding dates.

Photographs of Vesuvius taken just before the 1944 collapse showed the 1906 crater hole completely filled and overflowing. There was an inner flat floor, a conelet standing in the middle. The 1944 eruption collapsed the conelet, split the big outer cone, and sent flows to destroy San Sebastiano and several villages. The torrents of ash killed people and the electric station of the funicular railroad was destroyed, as usual. The mountain split in several directions.

Just as in 1906, the stages of the 1944 outbreak were lava flows, mixed lava gushing intensely liquid, crateral caving in, tremendous gas emission, black ash changing to vapor and white ash as the emission increased, and ultimately white steam. The black ash was the contemporaneous lava with dark augite; the snowlike white ash was ground up old lavas, containing the white crystals, leucite.

The liquid phase took an unusual fountain form, resembling that of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, and nine spells of bright incandescent explosive fountaining occurred. The collapse began on March 13; the fountaining occurred during March 20 to 22, with jets of bright liquid lava and flames, 1,000 to 3,000 feet high; and the crater became a lava lake. The flames were occasioned by hydrogen within the lava itself, and perhaps some carbon gases. This liquid fountaining phase was the culmination of explosions, making pumice, with water vapor the gaseous product. Ash fell four feet deep three miles away, and some fell on the Adriatic coast. Both white steam clouds and black ash clouds arose with the fountains, white and black side by side.

The net effect was to leave a bowl 1,500 feet in diameter and 800 feet deep, floored with avalanche gravel. This reconstructed the funnel of 1906, and as in 1906, the height of the rim was 4,100 feet after eruption. In other words, the thirty-eight years had filled the vast crater, only to have 1944 engulf and eject the contents, and strew them down the slopes, adding an immense weight to the outer shell of the cone.

A hundred million cubic yards of lava was poured out, and 50 million cubic yards of ash now lie on the volcano. Three times as much was carried far away, and the volume of gases was ten times as great. The rock fragments, probably 200 times as great, were engulfed by avalanches.

The big achievement of an eruption is to wedge open a mountain, let the internal lava effervesce and go down, admit ground water, and make spectacular fireworks of burning gas and meltings. Release of pressure by splitting open the crust permits a great show of fiery foaming, but no geologist sees the profound accomplishment of lava sinking and flowing away by underground channels. It may flow out along the Mediterranean Sea bottom. At Vesuvius, it may slip through deep cracks in the direction of Sicily.

Certainly a periodic adjustment of the big system (Vesuvius-Stromboli-Etna) has taken place deep down in the earth, and the thirty-eight years of accumulation mean a stress by weighting down. The pressure of 100 million tons of stored lava inside a weak cone mountain and ready to effervesce with heat and give up its hydrogen is what science too often forgets.

The continental crack system between crust blocks and full of rain water is waiting to assist the crisis, while the blocks are poised over uprising gases of the ages. The gases of the ages, reaching to the core of the globe, are eternally melting the walls with white-hot core matter, walls of siliceous rock blocks 1,800 miles deep. In this system, Vesuvius is a tiny pimple. Incidentally, the 1944 earthquakes were recorded in largest number during the period when the liquid pumice fountains were in action in the nine different spells between March 20 and March 23. This means that the maxima of engulfing crater, seething slag, outrushing gas, crunching mountain weight, and avalanching inner walls were all happening together. The clogging of vents forced the ground water steam into pulsations. This could not last; the mountain blocks settled and resumed pressure, deep lava drained off, heat dwindled, and gas was relieved. The bigger volcanic system asserted its downward weight of the adjusted globe.

By making much of pulsations and thirty-three year intervals, we are dreaming of an ideal volcano such as might be constructed as was our geyser apparatus. But there is no question of the reality of tides in rock, as well as in ocean; of day and night; cold and sunshine; year and century. Continent and ocean are positive, globe and solar system are positive. The ideal volcano is part of a tidal system and is limited in size. Therefore science has a right to inquire how it happens that through centuries most volcanoes stay 4,000 feet high. It has a right to look for averages and periodicities, just as a doctor looks for respiration, temperature, and heartbeats.

Like men, volcanoes are not all alike, but both men and volcanoes are orderly organisms. The object of volcanology is to find order and relate the small orderliness to the big regularity of globe and solar tides.

My 1906 visit at the end of the Vesuvian eruption crystallized my lifework idea, begun at Pelée; but my accomplishment was dwarfed to triviality by that of Perret, whom I first met while he was assisting the Italian volcano observatory. He was a photographer and observer of rare merit. He had been living in Naples and photographing all the Italian volcanoes, and he had worked out a solar control diagram for predicting volcano tides. Italy had made a volcanologist out of a physicist-engineer. Discovery of Perret meant to me much more than any phenomenon of geology.

Frank Alvord Perret was an electrical engineer from Brooklyn, and a genius with an ordinary Kodak. He took at Vesuvius, by sheer daring, the most remarkable photographs ever made of an active volcano. His knowledge of astronomy, meteorology, and physics made him see in a volcano something to study close at hand, as Benjamin Franklin studied a thunderstorm. He developed and printed his photographs himself, and colored his lantern slides. He helped Matteucci, the observatory director on Vesuvius, and was decorated as Chevalier by the King of Italy. He tramped close to lava vents and explosion clouds, and took hundreds of pictures.

Perret and I had exactly the same conception of a volcano. We thought of it as a living organism to record, just as rainfall is recorded by the weather man. For our recording, we had to invent volcano instruments. Though the camera was Perret’s supreme instrument, he had been an electrical inventor all his life. Businessmen in Springfield, Massachusetts, financed his work in Italy; and I went to Springfield to lecture and encourage their research association, the predecessor of our Hawaiian association.

Perret photographed Etna, Stromboli, Teneriffe, Sakurajima, Kilauea, the Carib cones and other volcanoes, and performed heroic work at the Messina earthquake of 1908. When, in 1929, Pelée entered into another of its periods of exploding and heaving it was studied critically by Perret who had established a museum and observatory at Martinique. He finally settled down at his museum in St. Pierre, and was of great service at the Montserrat earthquake crisis of 1933 and thereafter. He was not physically strong and the volcanic dust gave him pneumonia, but several times he recovered from attacks. He died in New York, having been forced north by the second World War.

I also met the Yorkshire oculist, geologist, and photographer, Dr. Tempest Anderson, on Vesuvius in 1906. This was another happy meeting. He too was a skilled volcano photographer, and had taken pictures in New Zealand and Iceland with his privately built cameras, using methods of extreme originality. He afterwards made for me a camera with small glass plates, dark chamber, arm sleeves, no plate-holder, alpenstock tripod, bottle strip-testing developer, self-drying metal case, and great perfection of rigidity and focus. We were to meet again and again in different parts of the world. He became one of the British experts sent to Soufrière by the Royal Society. He died of typhoid on a volcano voyage to the Philippines.

Shortly after my Vesuvius expedition I moved from Harvard to become head of geology at Massachusetts Tech. My teaching overlapped that of Professors W. Niles and W. O. Crosby at Tech and Wellesley, while for a time I continued my Harvard work. It was at this time that I began to think of possible ways of financing an expedition to the Aleutian Islands and their forty active volcanoes. The year 1906–1907 was a time of financial boom, so I went to Calumet and Hecla, the great copper company of which Agassiz was president. To my astonishment they subscribed $1,000 to start the Technology Expedition. State Street and Wall Street raised this to $13,000 in ten days, and I learned much about the availability of money during a boom of the stock market. President Pritchett of Harvard approved the expedition, and I organized it for a sailing schooner from Seattle, with nine in the crew and seven scientists.

5. Scientists of Technical Expedition to Aleutians, 1907; left to right: Jaggar, Gummere, Vandyke, Eakle, Sweeney, and Myers

6. Captain George Seeley of the Lydia, Technical Expedition to Aleutians, 1907

We set sail in the spring of 1907 and spent four months in that ocean of gales, fogs, rain, and cold between Dutch Harbor and Atka—the eastern half of the Aleutians. One man, Colby, was a bear hunter who explored the Alaskan Peninsula and reported on coal and gold. The scientists were two geologists, two mining students, a physician who was also botanist and entomologist, and an astronomer. They were Eakle, Myers, Sweeny, Vandyke, and Gummeré. The sailing master and mate were uncle and nephew, both Nova Scotians named Seeley. The following poem by the master tells the story better than I could.