The Martinique event was destined, through many explorers, to reform geophysics. Vesuvius introduced me to the importance of superb photography as represented by Perret and Anderson. The Aleutian Islands introduced the question of nautical exploration and the importance of a field base laboratory for work in a land of adverse weather. The Japan-Hawaii expedition showed me the national seismometric work of Dr. Omori in the field, and laid the foundation for the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. Finally, the Costa Rica expedition introduced me to the complexity of seismological field work in a land of volcanoes, with the problems of engineering ably investigated, and afterwards published by Spofford. This decade thus logically leads into a totally different one, field experiment in geography and founding a volcano observatory in and on the most active volcano in the world, with a permanent dwelling on a crater. CHAPTER IV Living with Volcanoes “_He took his journey into a far country._” The next decade began true experiments with volcanoes, when two organizations some 5,000 miles apart combined their resources. The Whitney Foundation created at Massachusetts Institute of Technology an endowment of $25,000 for geophysical work on earthquakes and volcanoes, expressing a preference for work in Hawaii; and a group of businessmen in Honolulu, the Volcano Research Association, offered to pay my salary for five years. When President Maclaurin and a group of professors at M. I. T. gave me a dinner at the University Club in Boston to celebrate my departure for Honolulu, the dinner table conversation turned to the terrors of the deep sea, the dangers of volcanoes, the awfulness of leprosy in Hawaii, and the heroism of giving up a secure teaching job in Boston. I replied that their pessimism reminded me of the last words of Daniel Webster, as quoted by a New England farmer, who said “Dan’l opened his eyes, took one look at the glass of whiskey on the table at his bedside, another at the pretty nurse, and said ‘I ain’t dead yet.’” I had organized the funds available so that a pair of Bosch-Omori seismographs were shipped from Strassburg, and other seismographs were ordered from Omori’s instrument maker in Tokyo. I collected experimental instruments such as high temperature thermometers and chronographs, of the type used in experimental physiology. Vaguely, I was going to take the blood pressure and pulse of the globe. Also I obtained a full set of weather bureau instruments for temperature, rainfall, barometric pressure, and humidity, together with the electric pyrometers, range finders, and photographic apparatus used in my previous expeditions. And I had some small Japanese transits, as well as plane tables and alidades for topographic experiments.