My Experiment with Volcanoes

Excerpt: "When I was fourteen my father the Reverend Thomas Augustus Jaggar, took our family to Europe, where botany and bird life were as much a part of my education as geography, French, and Italian. And it was during our visit in Italy that I made my first trip up Vesuvius. All of these early interests convinced me that I wanted to be a naturalist. It was Nathaniel Shaler at Harvard who told me to go and study the beaches at Lynn and Nahant. So I walked and photographed, and measured ripplemarks. I found a headland and a longshore accumulation with scallops dwindling regularly along the high-tide level. I found swash marks a foot across forming as the tide went out. On the dunes were other sand waves beautifully regular."