My Experiments With
Volcanoes

Thomas A. Jaggar

January 24, 1871—January 17, 1953

My Experiments With
Volcanoes

THOMAS A. JAGGAR

“Through faith we understand

That the worlds were formed

By the word of God,

So that things which are seen

Were not made of things which do appear.”

MCMLVI
HAWAIIAN VOLCANO RESEARCH ASSOCIATION
HONOLULU

Copyright, 1956, by the
Hawaiian Volcano Research Association

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY
THE COMMERCIAL PRINTING DIVISION OF THE
ADVERTISER PUBLISHING CO., LTD., HONOLULU

Thomas Augustus Jaggar, Jr.

January 24, 1871

January 17, 1953

It is the wish of the members of the Hawaiian Volcano Research Association to share with others the experiences they have enjoyed in their association with a truly great man.

On October 5, 1911, through the efforts of Thomas Augustus Jaggar, Jr., the Hawaiian Volcano Research Association was organized to assist in the support of the newly created Hawaiian Volcano Observatory at Kilauea, Hawaii. Accepting Dr. Jaggar’s sincere belief that a systematic and continuous study of volcanoes would result in the protection of life and property, the motto the Hawaiian Volcano Research Association adopted was “Ne plus haustae aut obrutae urbes.”

Dr. Jaggar arrived in Hawaii to take up his work at the Observatory on January 17, 1912—exactly forty-one years before the day of his death on January 17, 1953.

Dr. Jaggar spent the last years of his life writing the history of his sixty years of intensive, rugged, and hazardous scientific achievements. During many of these years, and up to the completion of his life’s history, it has been well stated that one of his most valuable co-workers was his wife, Isabel, who shared with him the disappointments, the joys of discovery, and much of the physical work. It is the privilege of the officers, directors and members of the Hawaiian Volcano Research Association to present in book form this story of Dr. Jaggar’s life.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

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.