The momentary intensity of the quake had been utterly without warning, as though two mountains had collided, and the masonry of the business section of Kingston crumbled almost instantaneously. A British major was walking along the main thoroughfare, carrying a heavy walking stick, when at the other end of the street, he noticed a commotion and thought it was a negro riot. The disturbance came toward him with a roar, and he saw clouds of dust rise from the street like a tornado and approach him. He felt the ground jolting, raised his stick, and decided to stand and fight it. The buildings right and left simply exploded, and he was fending off bricks and stones and timbers. His feet were half buried in rubble, and he sat down on a steel girder which had lunged out into the street behind him. The dust was suffocating, the noise was a traveling roar which went past him and on down the street behind him. He called to a black man to dig out his feet, but the man rushed by with staring, crazy eyes. He heard screams and saw women running. It was some time before Red Cross stations were established and the army men rescued him. The lesson taught by this earthquake, more intense than the one at Cartago, was that the wooden bungalows of the hilly suburbs on rocky ground stood the disaster better than even reinforced concrete in the congested waterfront district. The better built government buildings were preserved in part. The Jamaica law of 1907 had established definite boundaries for wooden construction, limited to the suburbs, and made new and wider streets in the business district. It had also established rigorous fire insurance laws, and a city building code requiring specified construction for all masonry. The result was a marked ring of parkway separating the commercial center from the dwellings in the suburbs. The trouble with such legislation, the effect of which I saw in Kingston twenty-six years later, is that earthquakes are hopelessly discontinuous. With no more big earthquakes as testers, such laws become dead letter, a new generation remembers nothing, and an irresponsible and ignorant native population poses new problems of poverty and vice. Earthquake construction reform becomes an impractical dream. This is part of the unsatisfactory quality of earthquake science, where assistance to humanity is concerned. So ends my expedition decade, 1901 to 1910, after a succession of studies in the field, which may be called Operation Pelée-Soufrière, Operation Vesuvius, Operation Aleutians, Operation Kilauea-Tarumai, and finally Operation Cartago. I did not think of these at the time as the strategic work of warring with a task force in geographical volcanology; but now as I look back on it, I can see in each expedition the organization of an institution and men, and progress of volcanic geology.