In 1899 two things happened which affected the rest of my life. First, Director Walcott asked me to furnish estimates for a Hawaii geologic survey, a request which eventually led me to Hawaii. Second, the Yakutat Bay earthquake snapped on an astonished world, though most of the world didn’t know it. The Yakutat Bay earthquakes in Alaska, in September 1899, were accompanied by the pushing up of the bedrock shoreline by forty-seven feet. Lowered beneath the sea were whole forests, on glacial deposits pulled down by submarine landslips. It was an uninhabited region at the foot of Mount St. Elias, along a fjord penetrating far into the mountains. It came in line with the Aleutian trench, under the Pacific, 4,000 fathoms deep. The earthquakes lasted two weeks. This colossal movement of blocks of the earth’s crust hundreds of miles across gave one the impression that we knew little of what was going on. Remembering that seventy-two percent of the earth’s surface is covered by oceans and that less than ten percent is really inhabited, I awoke to how much there was to learn. If whole forests and their roots could float away into the Pacific currents, with all their plants and animals and seeds and bacteria, what might not have occurred in past ages, when such jostling of crust blocks was common. But before I was to experiment with live volcanoes came a decade of laboratory experiment. CHAPTER II Imitating Ripplemarks “_The Constitution is an experiment, as all life is an experiment._” At the end of the century my experiments with the sclerometer, and with the class in experimental geology, steered me for years into laboratory experiment. Europe was headed toward geophysics and geochemistry, meaning chiefly mathematical and statistical analysis. My vision was nonmathematical, though I used pressures, temperatures, clocks, and yardsticks to measure erosion, sediment, warping of strata, and melting. This took me away from petrography, for the polarizing microscope was dealing with infinite series of minerals and molecules. I could see nothing but infinite penetration into the smaller and smaller. Clarence King and Frank Perret had been on the way to infinite journeying outward to the bigger and bigger. The guiding formula was “erosion, sedimentation, deformation, and eruption.” Measure these on the globe, imitate them with mud pies in the laboratory. Compare the global examples with the mud pies. Try to get the mud pies to illuminate the gigantic stream systems, flood plains, sea bottoms, folded mountains, intrusions, and lavas of the earth. Then try to measure in the field those processes with observatories. So, to me, came the transition from collections to experiments.