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.