It was necessary to keep track of improvements in photographic plates, for the fire pit with its dark red heat and dark red rocks was a difficult subject for photography. Fortunately, the panchromatic plate had recently been invented by Dr. C. E. K. Mees, and was a godsend for experiments in recording liquid lava splashing at night. Dr. Mees, chief of research at Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, has since been a visitor and good friend of the Observatory. Both surveying and photographing were difficult during 1912 because the inner pit sent up a dense column of fume which diminished only at those times when the liquid lava became hotter and developed fountaining. There was such smokeless development with hundreds of roaring fountains of liquid lava in January and July. The intervening period showed a great deal of smoke, and in August there was a dense column of silently rising gray fume the full width of the pit, so that nothing of the bottom could be seen. To determine the height of the bottom lava it was necessary to work from a fixed station with a transit, using a flashlight at night, and waiting for a view of a glowing spot or fountain. This involved reading vertical and horizontal angles, dependent on difficult determination from two stations, of the distance to the glow spot measured. Often in daytime one had to wait hours in order to get a view of the bottom through the fumes, from stations at the ends of a base line on the edge of the pit. At no time later, fortunately, were the fume conditions so bad as during 1912. A procedure was adopted of making a daily photograph of the smoke of the distant pit from the window of the observatory, and this proved of value when the inner lava lakes and crags rose to view in 1917. Like Perret, I made reports to the newspapers in Honolulu; and gradually these reports took the form of a monthly bulletin, edited in Honolulu by Dr. Howard Ballou, who was the secretary of the Hawaiian Volcano Research Association. This association had occasional Directors’ meetings, which I attended and before which I made reports and gave lectures. The report of the complete work done during the first few months of the year 1912 was published in Boston by Massachusetts Tech. The earlier history of Hawaiian volcanoes had been recorded in excellent books by such travelers as the Misses Gordon-Cumming and Isabella Bird, William Lowthian Green, and Drs. C. H. Hitchcock and W. T. Brigham, and Professor James D. Dana of Yale. Dana had been furnished with data from 1840 to 1890 by a Hilo missionary, Titus Coan. When I arrived in Hawaii, two books on Kilauea’s activity in 1909 had just been published, and a big monograph by Brun of Geneva who had determined that Kilauea lava was free from water vapor and was the hottest lava in the world.