My experiments with volcanoes

“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:

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”:

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.