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Updated: May 18, 2025
He could distinguish even by day, when the night stillness had withdrawn its favouring conditions, the borings of the sawdust insects in the logs of the cabin. Only he was very tired. His hands seemed a long distance away, as though it would require an extraordinary effort of the will to lift them. So he lay quiet and listened.
Passing over the confirmation which he draws from the "known rate of the deposit of Nile mud of about three inches a century," which would give a mild antiquity of twenty-six thousand years to pottery fished up from borings in the mud, since he admits that "borings are not very conclusive," we may notice how he deals with evidence from Chaldea on much the same principles. Here, again, the source had been till lately only "fragments quoted by later writers from the lost work of Berosus. Berosus was a learned priest of Babylon, who ... wrote in Greek a history of the country from the most ancient times, compiled from the annals preserved in the temples and from the oldest traditions." Still this "learned priest," though antecedently as competent a critic as Manetho, is so portentously mythical in his accounts, that "no historical value can be attached to them," which must be regretted, since he pushes history back a quarter of a million years prior to the Deluge, and the Deluge itself to about half a million years ago. Here, therefore, we are thrown solely upon the independent value of the monumental evidence, and must drop the argument from coincidence. This evidence, we are told, "is not so conclusive as in the case of Egypt, where the lists of Manetho, &c.... The date of Sargon I. (3800 B.C.) rests mainly on the authority of Nabonidus, who lived more than three thousand years later, and may have been mistaken." "The probability of such a remote date is enhanced by the certainty that a high civilization existed in Egypt as long ago as 5000 B.C." If the evidence for the antiquity of Chaldee civilization is "less conclusive" than that for Egyptian, and rests on it for an argument
But the ground is very complicated, and for proper study I should have required borings and cross-cuts. There were two big rough pits called shafts. I descended into the deeper one, which was fourteen to fifteen feet below ground.
After the results were plotted on the map, contour lines were drawn to indicate the rock surface, and profiles along the tunnel lines were plotted from the contours; as the borings were preliminary to the final location of the tunnels, and in many cases at some distance from the tunnel lines, considerable divergence from the actual rock surface was expected, and realized in a few places, yet on the whole the agreement was very good.
As to the depth of the great sandbank, borings have been made down to the chalk to a depth of seventy-eight feet a fact which might have been fairly conjectured from the depth of water inside the Goodwins, down to the chalky bottom being nine or ten fathoms, while the depth close outside the Goodwins, where the outer edge of the sands is sheer and steep, is fifteen fathoms, deepening a mile and a half further off the Goodwins to twenty-eight fathoms.
Among the minerals found are gold, silver, cinnabar, copper, iron, coal and petroleum; the chief products being opium, white wax, hemp, yellow silk. Szech'wan is a province rich in salt, obtained from artesian borings, some of which extend 2,500 feet below the surface, and from which for centuries the brine has been laboriously raised by antiquated windlass and water buffalo.
Again the blinding flashes of a few ray pistols, and instantaneous borings of the rays into the walls. The red coats nearest the escape tunnels fled down them in panic. Those whose escape I blocked dropped their weapons and shrank back against the smooth, iridescent green walls.
"Well, then," the Captain went on, "besides this toothed head of his, the animal is provided with a sucker at his mouth, by which he can hold on to any wooden pile or stonework he may wish to perforate so as to make his nest inside; and, gripping this firmly with his sucker and working the head of his shell slowly backwards and forwards with a sort of circular rocking motion, he gradually bores his way into the object of his affections, getting rid of the refuse he excavates by the aid of a natural siphon that runs through his body, and by means of which he blows all his waste borings away curious, isn't it?"
Whenever the sea-bottom, by some of those undulations of the earth's crust that I have referred to, becomes upheaved, and sections or borings are made, or pits are dug, then we become able to examine the contents and constituents of these ancient sea-bottoms, and find out what manner of animals lived at that period.
It began investigation in the summer of 1899, visiting Paris to examine the claims of the French Panama Company, and also Nicaragua and Panama. It surveyed, platted, took borings, and made a minute and valuable report upon the work which each of the proposed canals would require. Col. Frank J. Hecker. 2. William Barclay Parsons. 3. Wm. H. Burr. 4. C. E. Grunsky. 5. Ad. J. G. Walker. 6.
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