I earlier had had one unhappy experience with warning the Navy, when we registered a seismogram of a big earthquake in Alaska, which if submarine, would send us a tidal wave. I notified Pearl Harbor of the probable time of arrival of the wave, should the quake be submarine. It happened a big Army and Navy dinner party at Waikiki was set for just that time, but orders went out calling officers back to their posts and the party was disrupted. No tidal wave came, as the earthquake proved to be on the mainland of Alaska. The newspapers unmercifully jeered at me, but the Commanding Admiral told me not to change my policy. The 1946 wave was very large and the water rose in pulsations until it swept away the railroad bridge and washed out the whole waterfront of Hilo. The earthquake seismogram came at 2 A.M. when no one was watching, and the water wave at 8 A.M. came just when the Observatory workers went on duty. When the flood of ocean destroyed the Hilo breakwater and leaped over it to damage the principal wharves, many people were drowned. Considerable damage was done on Oahu and Maui. The disaster came when Dr. F. P. Shepard, oceanographer of La Jolla, was occupying a summer cottage on the north shore of Oahu; and he was delighted to experience a big tidal wave. Collaborating with geologists in Hawaii, Shepard compiled a most thorough report on height of waves in all bays of the Territory. Seismographs and tide gauges got to work all around the Pacific Ocean, the place on the sea bottom which had jolted was exactly located, and the Coast Survey and Navy started far-reaching precautions for predicting against future combinations of earthquake and water. This included seismographs that ring alarm bells at night. The object of science is always prediction and assisting humanity; and the need is always for more men. Another significant event of 1947 was the visit of Hans Pettersson of the Oceanographic Institute of Sweden who was conducting an expedition which followed the path of the _Challenger_. The object of the project was to study the oceanography of the sea bottom around the equator. Thus Pettersson was enthusiastic about my paper in _Natural History_ and its emphasis on studying sea bottoms. With him was inventor Kullenberg who had made a device for boring into the mud of the sea bottom and taking longer cores than had been dug previously. His apparatus consisted of a core barrel, tripped with valves close to the sea bottom under a heavy weight, which would allow it to sink sixty feet in suitable bottom ooze while the core rose inside the pipe without being compressed.