We have not one particle of evidence that before the race was killed off primordial volcanologists, who were very queer looking chaps, might have studied those eruptions with expensive instruments. Certainly they had a lot of copper at their disposal. Perhaps the great lakes were a continental sea, and some ancestor of _Lingula_ was scooped up for food by those doomed beings. But geology at Harvard was not all history. When R. A. Daly and I were graduate students, we worked on Ascutney Mountain, studying ancient fire-made granites. The hills were lumps of the ancient pastes crystallized. The crystals were feldspars, mica, quartz, and iron oxides. Oldest prisms were lime phosphate, the mineral apatite containing imprisoned brown glass. How did the several kinds of red hot paste invade the altered sedimentary slates? Was brown glass the ancestor? Lava is brown glass. Some of the phosphate crystals contain gas bubbles and liquids. Daly, who published the work, found that ancient lava pushed up while deep in the claystones, and shattered a hole by heat and cracking. The pieces sank and the paste or gas foam was injected in successive lumps. Each new lump had more silica. Apparently the fragments melted--some of the old sediments of Lower Silurian age were silica--and the invading magma was contaminated with more and more molten sand. So basalt turned into granite. Thus Ascutney Mountain in Vermont became a classic place for hot fluids squirting up and recrystallizing the under rock of New England. It made eventually, by erosion, the Connecticut River landscape. Daly became a specialist on granites, I became a specialist on lavas. We became professors at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Something new came into world geology when Wheeler, Hayden, King, Powell, Gilbert, and Dutton surveyed the Utah block fault mountains and the Rockies. They revealed the globe with a crust of gigantic cracked deep prisms, and an eroding surface. Davis of Harvard, the physical geographer, was at his zenith, and from Powell’s and Gilbert’s example came his classified river valleys. He devised systems of splendid topographic maps and models, and demonstrations of glacier steam beds and deltas. He made surface wear and dumping debris a living thing, and the land forms a record of it. Thus I was overjoyed when, in 1893, I received the summons to go with Arnold Hague to the land of geysers, colorful canyon, old volcanoes, and the source rivers of the Mississippi. My job was to take pictures with a huge camera, but I posed as microscope man, too. I climbed the highest peaks of the Absaroka Range, and I traveled with Hague and a mule packtrain back and forth across the range, collecting specimens. Hague had been with Clarence King during the 40th Parallel Survey for the Union Pacific railroads.