The point is that Stübel made a profound generalization which nobody has proved wrong. The earth is at least 3,000 million years old, and when oceanic fault blocks sank and received condensing atmospheric water and continental fault blocks remained high and became eroded, there was already a thick shell of volcanic lavas. For volcanism was the most ancient process on the earth’s surface. It had always brought gases up cracks from the core, making atmosphere, water, and extrusions. Stübel, called the extrusive shell on the outside of the primitive crust the globe’s armorplate. The primal gas escape, whatever the ancestral turbulence inside, had to come up cracks and make volcanic deposits. It is commonly presumed that the very thick inside crust formed rapidly by cooling and solidifying from outside the core inward, and from inside the atmosphere outward. The latter surface was eventually under water cooling over most of the earth and under air cooling over the small continental area, a marked difference of temperature and pressure for the two areas. Seismometry teaches that most of the crust is of fairly uniform density. Therefore, presumably, a thick crust was arrived at early. There was obviously a time of conflict between the weighting of the crust by its heavier accumulations next to the core, by its lighter accumulations exteriorly under water and air, and finally by its external armor plate of unknown comparative weight, made of volcanic lava. For all we know, this might have been volcanic pumice. Rapidity of crust thickening is speculative. Right here there is an element of mystery in speculation as to which has to accommodate comparison with the moon, the merging of atmospheric condensation with volcanism, and the merging of suboceanic condensation of lava with pristine eruption. This is too hard a nut to crack, in our current ignorance of rock under sea bottom muds. But Stübel’s insistence on a coating of lava armor plate over both continents and sea bottoms as the earlier volcanism, and an external veneer on the earth, is unavoidable. If it were all basalt like the present oceanic volcanoes, we should find basalt in continents underneath the granites. We do not do so. If it were all light weight granitizing by segregation of silica, we should find commonly granite and obsidian fragments within oceanic lavas. We do not do so. We have to conclude then that our sections, topographic and geologic, do not go deep enough. And as for the ocean bottoms, we have no sections at all. But Stübel was right. An unknown volcanic eruption period had to precede geologic volcanoes.