It was about this time that the need for observatories began to be recognized. Something new and of grave menace had come into geology, terrible steam blasts capable of shooting out horizontally and explosively. And even as I write in 1952 these have been taking human lives at Mount Lamington in Papua and Mount Hibokhibok on Camiguin Island of the Philippines. At Vesuvius, under Palmieri, an observatory had been established about 1859. The director was interested in meteorology as affected by Vesuvius, and annual reports were published irregularly. Successive directors became interested in making instruments for volcano science and Mercalli, the director in 1907, published a book in Italian on the active volcanoes of the world. When I went to Mount Pelée I was mindful of the venture at Vesuvius; and Professor Lacroix of Paris established artillery officers near St. Pierre ruins after the disaster, to watch and report as a volcano observatory. They furnished details and photographs of the many eruptions and the growth of the lava dome and spine. Doctors Hovey, Flett, Anderson, Lacroix, and Heilprin returned to Mount Pelée and added much to the observational and photographic record, and Dr. Stübel published a special book inspired by critical study of the Caribbees, in comparison with Andean volcanoes. Hovey and I put through a resolution in 1907 at the meeting of the Geological Society of America, “strongly recommending the establishment of volcano and earthquake observatories.” Perret and I were both inventors of instruments, both experimenters, and both convinced that the expedition method alone would never solve the volcano problem. The brothers Friedlaender of Zurich were establishing a “Zeitschrift für Vulkanologie,” in Naples, and a laboratory with German, Swiss, and Italian assistants. The Carnegie Institution established in Washington a geophysical laboratory devoted to high temperature physical chemistry. We others were influenced by field ambition, and since 1899 I had fought for a Hawaii geological survey, for I was convinced that Kilauea Volcano there must have an American volcano observatory. My experiments on erosion, sedimentation, deformation, and eruption convinced me that a field experimental science was bound to grow up in each of those parts of dynamical geology. All of these needed field observatories to determine index of erosion, index of sedimentation, index of ground movement and earthquake, index of volcanism; these indices to be quantitative just as the thermometer and barometer and wind gauge made climatology a quantitative science of the air. I found almost nothing being accomplished in these new field sciences. No one dreamt of attacking the Mississippi as a field of pure science of erosionology, compared to the Amazon. It was felt that these things could be left to commerce and the engineers.