The logic to the effect that in the long and large the old volcanoes from Hawaii to Midway have been on slices of the earth’s crust faulted downward below sea level through the ages seems incontrovertible. The fault planes are diagonals across the main volcanic rift trend and make the channels between the islands at an angle in plan to the trend of the island chain. These channels are very deep. All of this philosophy developed in my mind before I came to Hawaii. Also I thought that the origin of life might have been from volcanic gas, owing to the prominence of carbon dioxide, water vapor, hydrogen, sulfur, and nitrogen, all ingredients of both protein and volcanoes. I put this up to R. T. Jackson, who taught me phylogeny when I was studying fossils and he was studying genetics. Knowing the sulfurous quality of an egg yolk, I asked him if it wasn’t possible that as evolution goes back behind the embryo, we should find volcanic traces chemically. Phylogeny means that the history of the embryo reenacts the history of the race, and I merely extended this back to the inorganic. I was laughed at for carrying biological origin back to gases of volcanoes; but Shepherd and I collected gases from flaming Kilauea lava, and found the five elemental constituents: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and sulfur. These also make up the aminoacids of protein, so my philosophy of origin still seemed to me to be reasonable. Volcanoes erupted through the ocean, and life came out of the unexplored deeps of the sea. Thus in 1910 I began a book on craters which came to fruition in a Memoir of the Geological Society. This was not published until 1947, but I was working on it, drawing the diagrams, dictating the typescript to Sato, and selecting for illustration the best of our photographs during the thirties. One of the diagrams shows eleven-year cycles, beginning with 1790 and ending with 1935. I adopted this after finding in Hitchcock a tabulation for Halemaumau, indicating big lowerings of lava in 1790, 1823, 1855, and 1891, to which we added 1924 from our own experience. These were approximately thirty-three years apart, as I found when I plotted the data on a curve of Hitchcock’s table. Taking other major sinkings as punctuation points--such as the outflows and collapse of Halemaumau in 1832, 1840, 1868, and 1931--there developed a correspondence in the subsidence times treated as repose periods, with the years having the least numbers of sunspots at average intervals of 11.1 years. The intervening times of maxima of sunspots all occurred in the intermediate times of rising lava.