The trail still followed knife-edge divides with perilous slopes on both sides of the path, but now concealed with mountain growth. We rode nearly to the edge of the crater, now a very different picture, with a large lake only a few hundred feet below, as it had been before the eruption of 1902. Two sturdy native women coming from Chateau Belair appeared with baskets of fruit on their heads, tramping a 3,000 foot height to deliver their goods to Georgetown on the east side of the island. This is an old story for these straight-backed natives, and these treks across mountains were equally characteristic of the creoles in Martinique and the northern islands. These people would spend the night near their market on the opposite side of the islands. In Kingstown we were shown the elaborate process by which arrowroot is made into edible starch, the powdery product being critically graded by delicate shades of color. This corm, which makes inconspicuous fields of low growing pointed _Canna_ leaves and small white flowers, is quite different from the cassava, or manioc, which I had known on my first visits to the West Indies. Arrowroot has been developed by the agricultural experiment stations of the British, who for many years searched for a new commercial product. The St. Vincent arrowroot is now a major industry which has spread to the other islands and is cultivated by small planters. In the volcano islands I interviewed government people to call attention to the crisis in Montserrat, using it as an illustration of the need at the numerous vents for the development of observatory methods, particularly in geology, chemistry, oceanography, and seismology, including measurements of ground surface movements and tilt. I had recommended this for Martinique and St. Vincent in 1902; and Perret, with some support by the French government, had gone to live in St. Pierre and make a museum, stimulated by the Pelée outbreak of 1929. So far as geophysics is concerned, the governments of St. Vincent and Jamaica have gone to sleep since the volcano disaster of 1902 and the earthquake building reforms of 1907. It is discouraging to a scientist to know that the science of economic geophysics and geography in such a magnificent field as the West Indian volcanoes has to be awakened by such disasters as were now occurring in Montserrat, with no forecasting at all. The whole Montserrat episode was like our unforeseen Hualalai earthquakes of 1929, and in both places my shock recorder was called in to help. We went on to Barbados, a flat non-seismic land, where in 1902 I had interviewed the _Roraima_ victims. We returned by way of St. Lucia, where we drove to the solfatara, which as usual is in a valley with sulfur and hot springs, near sea level, and not in a crater.