Forty years of this lead far away from Lyell’s geology--the geology of uniform processes past and present--and from brachiopods and trilobites. It lead to the ancestor of volcanoes. It lead to ancestral gas. It lead back 10 billion years. A lava splash might be a live souvenir of that age. More than anything else, this belief pointed our instruments down, to the inside of the globe. Six decades of a man’s life. Decades of geology, exploration, foundation, outspreading, prediction, and fruition. The fact of fruition makes the telling worth while. Geological education was unbelief. Fruition was belief, verified by growth of unified science. Culmination was not geology but science. Uniformity, evolution, and symmetry are in nature. Value and number are human. I have been called geologist and seismologist, volcanologist and geophysicist. I am none of these. I am interested in the evolution of what Hoyle calls “This quite incredible universe.” I am just as interested in Bergson’s “Creative evolution” as in Hoyle and Lyttleton’s “New cosmology.” And more interested in life than in either. The elements of fruition are a thick earth crust, a comparable pattern for earth and moon, and a mechanism for earth core. This is the story of sixty years of volcaneering. _My Experiments With_ Volcanoes CHAPTER I Young Scientist “_The gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone._” It was the training of my youth under a father who loved God’s out-of-doors that led me to Audubon’s birds; to tramping miles over carries in Maine, Labrador, and Nova Scotia; and to fishing with another eight year old, named Willie Grant. When I was fourteen my father the Reverend Thomas Augustus Jaggar, took our family to Europe, where botany and bird life were as much a part of my education as geography, French, and Italian. And it was during our visit in Italy that I made my first trip up Vesuvius. All of these early interests convinced me that I wanted to be a naturalist. It was Nathaniel Shaler at Harvard who told me to go and study the beaches at Lynn and Nahant. So I walked and photographed, and measured ripplemarks. I found a headland and a longshore accumulation with scallops dwindling regularly along the high-tide level. I found swash marks a foot across forming as the tide went out. On the dunes were other sand waves beautifully regular. Try it. Lie on your stomach and watch them. They are at right angles to the wind. Smooth them out and see what the wind does. It piles little flocculent heaps of course grains, each with an eddy downwind. The fine stuff migrates up the slopes forward with the wind, backward on the leeward side. The powder streams meet and lengthen the hills right and left.