When it comes to the big oval of the whole Black Hills uplift--swollen up like the Rocky Mountains during millions of years and within which the lava injections were only an item--we are dealing with a push from below or an expansion that swelled up the pre-Cambrian ancient rocks as well as the later granites. Such swellings were doubtless made again and again in Massachusetts. There, also, we find lavas and granites and Red Beds and glacial boulders, older than the Appalachian Mountains, as well as younger. The younger Triassic lavas are definitely erupted between fault blocks. All that our experiments showed was what melted stuff will do in strata under weight, when the force of melted stuff overcomes that pressure to find a place for itself, although the weight may be more or less lifted by big arching that is taking place on a big scale. The arching is bigger than the hydraulic or gas pressure squirting. There is another possibility besides buckling. This is faulting, or movement of deep crust blocks the boundaries of which do not appear. The deep crust is a movable mosaic above the core, and this movement renews itself, now here, now there. Dutton shows that we may think of the Rocky Mountains this way all the way out to the Pacific coast. We may have the core fluids sucking down the blocks, the volcanic fluids pushing up the local strata. And the volcanic fluids in cracks are the degenerate gassy top remnants of the core fluids which man has never seen and which are 1,800 miles down. The boundaries of the crust blocks do not appear because the whole first shell of the globe is buried under lavas and intrusions and crystals and mud, meaning by mud, countless dumpings of lakes and rivers and seas through 3,000 million years. Such is the kind of thinking started by making wax injections. It will be seen from the experiments that whether we are imitating underground heat with a Bunsen burner to start a geyser, or overground cold with delta apparatus to simulate a glacier, we are dealing with erosion of the earth’s surface. Erosion started with the first attack on lava by the atmosphere or by sea water. Never was the pristine lava anything like the magma inside the globe; it snapped and chilled and oxidized. Whether we call it basalt or obsidian, it degenerated. Moreover, it degenerated in the outer crust when it loosed its gases, heated itself and the rock wall, found groundwater and free air, and started oxidation new to it. Thermal action is just as much concerned with erosion as is rainfall or snow. Therefore, whether injecting wax and swelling strata or imitating geysers and ripplemarks, we were experimenting with volcanoes, for the crust of the earth is fundamentally volcanic. For the purposes of this book these facts demand reiteration.