It was during this decade and after my New Zealand trip that such persons as Omori and Nakamura, in Japan, and geologists in Seattle, Berkeley, and Pasadena began to take an interest in the volcano problem as dominant in the study of earthquakes. There were conflicting theories about the earth crust. Earlier, in Hawaii, Wood was a disciple of the tectonic or contracting theories of the earth, whereas I increasingly believed volcanism to be profound, crustal, oceanic, and ancient. It is more fundamental than the strata and mountain folds of continents. This conflict extended to the water question in volcanology. I was inclined to believe the waters of eruption to be oxidized hydrogen, whereas such physical chemists as Day, Shepherd, and Allen believed water vapor, like carbon dioxide, to be fundamental in magma. The whole question of the origin of oxygen--the most abundant element of the rocks, air, and water--is a matter of startling doubt in geology. Where oxides are known to exist in lava, flames of oxidation make the gaseous fires; and underground water full of oxygen plays a part in steamblast eruption. All the waters of glaciers and oceans are oxides, and prove that the volcanic oxidation of hydrogen was the most primitive of the volcanic processes. Dr. E. H. Allen found water vapor dominant in the Sulphur Bank gas at Kilauea, whereas Day and Shepherd, who opposed Brun, thought water dominant in the gases of live lava. Its great preponderance in geological theory for such eruptions as Vesuvius led Allen to review theories and publish a long paper designed to refute my notion that oxidizing hydrogen is the primary volcanic ingredient. As to earthquakes and so-called tectonic faults, the whole of geology has its thinking so warped by continents, the dwelling place of mankind, and so diverted from the great linear trenches and the ridges of the ocean crowned with volcanoes parallel to the deeps, that I became incredulous, along with Willis and Oldham, about the textbook cause of earthquakes. The fascination offered by fossils, by ages of shellfish and reptiles, and by mountains of folded strata like the Alps and the Himalaya makes the votaries of evolutionary science neglect the mud-covered rocks and oceanic mountain ranges of almost three-quarters of the surface of the globe. This seventy-two percent they have never seen, nor collected hard rock specimens from, nor even mapped topographically. They are not acquainted with it by exploration, and their theories about it are a blank, except that gravity pendulums indicate it to be basalt.