Dig

“ The diggers are gesticulating, running about. Carefully they dig and loosen the soil about another object. A band of carved stone comes to light; it is a curved band, and as they work about it ever so carefully, they find it is part of a cylinder buried deep in the earth. They work excitedly, removing the earth, digging down until they reveal a mighty stone jar, a jar big enough for a man to stand upright in, a jar which the ancients used as a store. ”

“ There should be more corn-fields to plough and ditches to dig, and everyone who subscribes himself priest or pastor should be compelled to dig so many hundred feet every year, even if they missed part of their prayers and confessions. ”

“ If we dig down through the soil and subsoil to a sufficient depth, we always come sooner or later to the solid rock. In many places the rock actually reaches the surface, or rises in cliffs, hills, or ridges, far above it. ”

“ You dig a hole, like Robinson Crusoe; you gather sticks for fire, and bake the earth you get out of your hole,—partly into bricks, partly into tiles, partly into pots. If there are any stones in the neighbourhood, you drag them together, and build a defensive dyke round your hole or cave. ”

“ When we now dig down through the rocks we come upon the portions of trees and other plants which the lapse of time, and the influence of pressure, have turned from leaves and wood into our familiar coal. ”

“ Moreover, if thou wilt examine this country with thine eyes, if thou wilt regard the rounded and worn stones that are found in the soil, however deep thou mayest dig,—stones which near the mountains, where the rivers roll down violently, are large ”

“ It is invisible, but there is the slight slope to prove that the sand has been heaped against something, to show that its path has been stayed by some object. These are some of the things which help the experts to select the spot on which to dig. ”

“ After the hole has been sufficiently deepened, the débris must be loaded into a bucket, which must then be hauled to the surface of the ground and emptied. How long do you calculate the man will require to dig in this manner, fifty, a hundred feet? ”

“ Such water will of course be spring-water, with the characteristics of the soil through which it rises. If the well be shallow, and fed by surface springs, all impurities of the soil will be found in it; and thus to dig deep becomes essential, for many reasons. ”

“ Will explained that we were anxious to know how foundations are sunk.
Photograph by Brown Brothers.
SWINGING THE BUCKET UP TO THE AIR-LOCK—THE IRON BLOCKS ARE USED TO KEEP THE CAISSON DOWN. “Simply a case of dig, dig, dig,’ said Mr. Squires, “until we get to rock; when we get down to water, we keep it out of the excavation with compressed air.” ”

“ Your breath comes short and quick, you are feverish with excitement; the dinner-bell may ring its clapper off, you pay no attention; friends may die, weddings transpire, houses burn down, they are nothing to you; you sweat and dig and delve with a frantic interest—and all at once you strike it! ”

“ Subterranean rivers were a source of trouble and sometimes disaster to the diggers, but with their newly discovered ingenuity the workers learned to overcome and divert them to their own purposes. Sink holes, crumbling rocks and other calamities often retarded progress. ”

“ If a well were sunk at our feet in the midst of the city of Norwich, the diggers would very soon find themselves at work in that white substance almost too soft to be called rock, with which we are all familiar as "chalk." ”

“ I have seen motions of the air so furious that they have carried, mixed up in their course, the largest trees of the forest and whole roofs of great palaces, and I have seen the same fury bore a hole with a whirling movement digging out a gravel pit, and carrying gravel, sand and water more than half a mile through the air. ”

“ So our rivers are doing to-day what they have always done—they are tearing down rocks, grinding and sifting the fragments, and letting them fall where the current of fresh water meets a great body of water that is still, or has currents contrary to that of the river.
Do you see a little dead fish in the water? It is on the way to become a fossil, and the mud that sifts over it, to become a layer of slate. Every seashore buries its dead in layers of sand and mud. ”

“ The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountains, the river its channel in the soil, the animal its bones in the stratum, the fern and leaf their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop marks its sculpture in the sand or the stone. ”

“ A glass of water taken from the muddy river, to show how the fine particles worn from the stones, settle down on the bottom as a layer of mud. You see the story of land goes around a circle. Mother earth is all the time tearing down and building up. She doesn't mind spending millions of years in grinding a mountain into mud and sand; pressing these into stone, and lifting the rock layers into mountain chains again. ”

“ The domes, ridges, and spurs also show the influence of glacial action in their forms, which approximately seem to be the forms of greatest strength with reference to the stress of oversweeping, past-sweeping, down-grinding ice-streams; survivals of the most resisting masses, or those most favorably situated. How interesting everything is! Every rock, mountain, stream, plant, lake, lawn, forest, garden, bird, beast, insect seems [Pg 241] to call and invite us to come and learn something of its history and relationship. ”

“ One can gaze with indifference upon a little stream that trickles through a wall, so long as it is thought to be merely a natural spring of water; but when one is informed that this is the trickling of water through a dike which dams out the raging sea, the sensations are changed to a realizing sense of imminent peril. ”

“ And with time, the beds of the rivers having fallen, these animals having the impression of the mud which has inclosed them and consumed their flesh and organs, the bones alone remaining—their organization being consumed—they have fallen to the bottom of the concavity of their impression; and in that concavity the mud, when it has been dried by its elevation above the course of the river from its aqueous moisture and then from its viscous moisture, becomes stone, inclosing within itself whatever it finds there and filling everything hollow with itself. ”

“ For, instead of finding rest at once, like the snow which falls into the tranquil depths of the forests, it is rolled over and over, beaten against rock-ridges, and swirled in pits and hollows, like boulders, pebbles, and sand in the pot-holes of a river, until finally the delicate angles of the crystals are worn off, and the whole mass is reduced to dust. ”

“ Waiting for some reply, I looked about me, noticing how the sluice was abandoned and broken, and how the house—of wood with a tiled roof—would not be proof against the weather much longer, if it were so even now, and how the mud and ooze were coated with lime, and how the choking vapour of the kiln crept in a ghostly way towards me. ”

“ Now, the power of this moving water is a mighty wide-spread agent of change in the physical condition of the globe. For wherever water is in motion over the surface of the land, whether it be a rippling stream, or a mountain torrent, or a majestic river, it is surely wearing away the channel through which it flows, and carrying along in its course particles of clay, or sand, or gravel. ”

“ The stream, at a vast height above him, is seen leaping from ledge to ledge,—sometimes lost, sometimes sparkling in sunshine, till it courses impetuously beneath the rock on which he is seated, and is lost in the deep unbroken obscurity of the forest. ”

“ In the deeply cut gorges the life-giving waves of the fertilizing stream contend in vain with the unimpressionable rocks, on which they hurl themselves roaring and foaming, blustering and thundering, as if enraged that their generosity is met with ingratitude and their beneficence with disdain. ”

“ The glaciers grind down the mountains, the rains and frosts wear the land into mud, and rivers carry that mud into the sea. In the calm depths of ocean this mud subsides to the bottom; it becomes consolidated into rocks; in the course of time these rocks again become raised, to form the dry land with which we are acquainted. ”

“ The water in the ground dissolves the rock or the loose earth into little particles so fine that the tiny roots, or root hairs, drink them up, and so the rock furnishes a part of the nourishment, or food, of plants.
"Without the water that the clouds bring no plant could grow. It gives life and growth to everything that lives, and then sinks deep into the earth. It comes out of the ground again in springs, and flows away in rivulets, brooks, creeks, and rivers—away, and away, back to the ocean again. ”

“ Streams bear their burden of gravel, sand, and mud into lakes and leave it there. (3) The winds blow dust and sand into the lakes, and in some places pile the sand up into dunes along the shores. (4) Animals of various sorts live in the lakes, and their shells and bones give rise to deposits comparable to the animal deposits in the sea. (5) Abundant plants grow in the shallow water about the borders of many ponds and lakes, and as they die, their substance accumulates on the bottom. (6) At the outlet the water is constantly lowering its channel. ”

“ Try yourself, dear reader, and make experiments, with running water, pebbles, and mud. If you try for seven years, I believe, you will never contrive to make your pebbles lie about in your mud, as they lie about in every pit in the boulder clay. ”

“ There were tales of men fording rivers who were suddenly overwhelmed by terrific walls of water which rushed down from the higher mountains in masses four and eight feet high. In coming they made a thundering among the hills and they plucked up full grown trees like twigs thrust into wet mud. ”

“ You will find most of the rocks of our hills and valleys to have been originally laid down in the sea, where they were formed out of sand and mud dropped on the sea floor, just as sand and mud are carried out to sea and laid down there now. ”

“ No plants grow there, and woe to the man or beast that strays on to the downs from the dike, or the heath beyond. The sand will sink beneath the feet of the incautious wanderer; if he draws up one foot, the other will sink yet deeper. ”

“ When we come to examine more closely the work which rivers do in removing mineral substances from the land by washing particles of them from the surface, we find that the records they leave in geological history must be plainly marked. Every stream, large or small, is always busy carrying mud, sand, or gravel. ”

“ A river flowing to the sea or emptying itself into an inland lake, carries its burden of gravel, sand, and mud, and sooner or later, as the rate of flow slackens, it deposits the materials in the river-bed or on the floor of the sea or lake. ”

“ We have but to pause over those words—one thousand feet thick;—once mud, or rather fluviatile deposits of mud and sand, a thousand feet thick in order to receive fresh evidence of the high antiquity of the globe, and of the recent creation of man. ”

“ Like the winter torrents in some parched land, the more they foam, the more speedily does the bed of them dry up again, and the more they carry down the very soil in which growth and fertility would be possible. A rush of feeling is apt to leave behind hard, insensitive rock. ”

“ Whirling stones, in the spring floods, have cut well-holes in the rock, as round and even as if they had been made with a drill, and sometimes you can see the very stone that sunk the well lying at the bottom. ”

“ All the face of the rock between the streams of falling water is covered with clinging plants and flowering shrubs, and one rock, shaped like a cross, which projected from the center out into the falling spray, was enwreathed with flowers like an artificial garland, as if they had been hung there by some dear woman's hand, to mark the last resting place of the loved and lost. ”

“ Where we landed there was no dry spot, and as we advanced through the woods we immediately found ourselves entangled in the midst of the roots of the trees, with the water above our waists, sinking knee deep into the mud, ignorant at every step whether the next might bring us into water up to our necks or above our heads. ”

“ In all these volcanic soils, water, and water only, is needed to convert the thirsty dust into most fertile earth. Here, what with perennial springs and an excessive rainfall, the mountains have an abundant water-supply; and in every ravine a clear sparkling stream is fed by countless rills and waterfalls, cool and delicious. ”

“ The earth's surface is continually being changed; the outcropping hard rock is worn away by wind and rain, and is broken up by frost, by solution of some minerals, etc. The loose material formed is blown away or washed away by rain and deposited elsewhere by streams in gravel bars, sand beds, and mud flats. ”

“ But the foreign substances, such as drift-wood, ice, sand and gravel, with which the waters of a river are occasionally charged, contribute more than everything else to its abrading power. At such times its volume is generally greatest, and its current the most rapid. ”

“ Or, again, if you take a river, rushing down from its mountain sources, brawling over the stones and rocks that intersect its path, loosening, removing, and carrying with it in its downward course the pebbles and lighter matters from its banks, it crushes and pounds down the rocks and earths in precisely the same way as the wearing action of the sea waves. ”

“ Wind deposits both of dust and of sand may be expected to contain the remains of land shells, bits of wood, and bones of land animals, testifying to the fact that they were accumulated in open air and not in the sea or in bodies of fresh water. ”

“ The water dashing violently against these rocks, is beaten back, and rebounds the contrary way, by which are made wonderful whirlpools, and by the repeated influx, the whole place is covered with froth and foam, to the no small amazement of the beholders: for the river there runs down with as quick and violent a current, as an arrow out of a bow. ”

“ It is evident that the sedimentary rocks of all ages have been derived from the degradation of land. The gravel, sand, and mud, of which they consist, existed previously as part of mountains, hills, or plains. ”