"Excavate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... convenient to employ me as a tub to the whale, and, having first excited the insular jealousy against archaeological intrusion by foreigners, and inducing his clique of subordinate intriguers to oppose my operations, though the Christian population in general were in favor of permitting me to excavate wherever I liked, he made them the concession of refusing me the permission I sought. Therefore, while he promised me all things and urged me to go at once to select my locality, he wrote to the Porte advising the refusal of the firman, which had been applied ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... high, or perhaps by only one or two layers of stones, are found, though rare. Many so-called caves—which are merely "tunnels," "bubbles," or "blow-holes" in the lava—were utilized as burial vaults. The natives vigorously protested against an attempt to excavate any of these, claiming that their ancestors or members of their families are buried in them and must not be disturbed. In the dunes human skeletons are frequently exposed by the shifting of the sands by the high wind. The ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... for the storage of the immense stocks required through the development of the champagne trade, these vast subterranean galleries have been successfully utilised by various firms. Messrs. Pommery, after pumping out the water with which the chambers were filled, proceeded to excavate the intersecting tunnels, shore up the cracking arches, and repair the flaws in the chalk with masonry, finally converting these abandoned quarries into magnificent cellars for the storage of champagne. No less than 60,000 was spent upon them and the castellated ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... further evidence of my power to compel the cessation of hostilities within twenty-four hours, I"—there was a pause for nearly a minute, during which the ticking of the big clock sounded to Thornton like revolver shots—"I will excavate a channel through the Atlas Mountains and divert the Mediterranean into the Sahara ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... Higson's proposal. Archy Gordon and Desmond were stationed at the window to give notice should any one attempt to look in, while the rest carefully examined the ground round the walls. A soft spot was found, and they agreed that it would be easy to excavate it with their knives and pieces of the bench which had been easily wrenched off. Believing nobody would come in for the remainder of the day, they at once set to work, and before long had dug a tunnel ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... build shanties or "hunkies," hunt with sling shots, build fires before huts in the woods, cook their squirrels and other game, play Indian, build tree-platforms, where they smoke or troop about some leader, who may have an old revolver. They find or excavate caves, or perhaps roof them over; the barn is a blockhouse or a battleship. In the early teens boys begin to use frozen snowballs or put pebbles in them, or perhaps have stone-fights between gangs than which ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... is an error: M. Botta made the first attempt to excavate the Ninevite remains at Khorsabad. Mr. Layard had, moreover, commenced his excavations before he received the countenance of the British Museum authorities. See "Nineveh—the Buried City of the East," one of the volumes of the "National Illustrated Library," for the rectification of ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... return and the cough to diminish in frequency and violence. And then came to the ranch where he lodged and boarded an expedition from an eastern museum. It was an expedition sent to explore the near-by canyon for trace of the ancient "cliff dwellers," to find and, if need be, excavate the villages of this strange people and to do research work among them. The expedition was in charge of an eminent scientist. Galusha met and talked with the scientist and liked him at once, a liking which was to grow ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... encouraged Schliemann to excavate other Homeric sites. At Mycenae, a prehistoric city of Argolis in Greece, he laid bare six rock-hewn graves, containing the skeletons of nineteen persons, men, women, and children. The faces of the dead had been covered with thin masks of gold, and their bodies ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... the roots of some gigantic tree in various directions. The great hole represented the trunk of the tree, and this had once been solid lead ore, but all had been laboriously cut away, as well as many of the branches, which represented the roots, though plenty were left to excavate, and fresh ones and new cavities were constantly being formed, so that the Eden mine at Black Tor was looked upon as ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... ago in the pages of "The Craftsman" which gave rise to the ideas embodied in "Victor Roy." It is not a story of profound depth. Its aim is not to soar to Alpine heights of imagination, or to excavate undiscovered treasures from the mines of thought. It is a very simple story, told in very simple words, of such lives as are around us in our midst. It tells of sorrows that are daily being borne by suffering humanity, and of the faith that gives strength ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins
... men. Of course there are some sorts of employment where it would be unjust to pay men by the amount of work done—as, for instance, in some parts of tin-mines, where a fathom of rock rich in tin is as difficult to excavate as a fathom of rock which is poor in tin—but in work such as we are describing the ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... hive-bee{292}; here again we must look to some faculty or means by which they make their hexagonal cells, without indeed we view these instincts as mere machines. At present such a faculty is quite unknown: Mr Waterhouse supposes that several bees are led by their instinct to excavate a mass of wax to a certain thinness, and that the result of this is that hexagons necessarily remain. Whether this or some other theory be true, some such means they must possess. They abound, however, ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... wall could be superimposed. This required much additional labour, and great risk and damage was encountered during the progress of the work at the date of the impending rise of the waters of the Nile. Rubble dams were raised to ward off the waters from the point where it was necessary to excavate. The holes were gradually filled with solid blocks of granite; then the base of the structure, one hundred feet in width, was laid, and the massive piers, capable of resisting the immense pressure of the water during the height of the floods, were raised, and ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... feet under the level of low water of ordinary spring tides. The formation of these dock-entrances was a work of much difficulty, demanding great skill on the part of the engineer. It was necessary to excavate the ground to a great depth below low water for the purpose of getting in the foundations, and the cofferdams were therefore of great strength, to enable them, when pumped out by the steam-engine, to resist the lateral pressure of forty feet of water at high tide. The ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... limb of an apple-tree, which he excavated several autumns ago. I say "he" because the red plume on the top of his head proclaims the sex. It seems not to be generally known to our writers upon ornithology that certain of our woodpeckers—probably all the winter residents—each fall excavate a limb or the trunk of a tree in which to pass the winter, and that the cavity is abandoned in the spring, probably for a new one in which nidification ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... shadow of a cause shown, or a reason assigned, except it might be that reason—to a Scotsman the most unpalatable of all—the propriety of assimilating the institutions of both countries; in other words, of coercing Scotland to adopt the habit of her neighbours—to excavate the foundation-stone of our whole prosperity, and make us the victims of a theory which, even if sound, could not profess to give us one tittle more advantage than the course which we had so long pursued! We believe that if the annals ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... villa that we called 'Ragnall' after this house, are the remains of a temple which were almost buried in the sand. This temple George obtained permission to excavate. It proved to be a long and costly business, but as he did not mind spending the money, that was no obstacle. For four winters we worked at it, employing several hundred men. As we went on we discovered ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... then attack the twigs to feed on the base of the leaves and tender bark and concentrate in the bark of the trunks and large branches of some of the living healthy trees and bore through the bark to excavate their short vertical egg galleries. The eggs are deposited along the sides of these galleries and the larvae hatching from them excavate the radiating food burrows which serve to girdle ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association
... proceeds is driven by hammer to the depths required. The material inside the shell is then washed out by a water jet to the bottom of the shell and then for a further distance below the shell bottom. An expanding cutter is then lowered to the bottom of the hole and rotated horizontally so as to excavate a conical chamber, the water jet washing the earth out as fast as it is cut away. When the chamber has been excavated the water is pumped out and the chamber and shell are filled with concrete. The drawings of Fig. 51 show the method of construction clearly. ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... own, left Tura by a road which zig-zagged towards all points through the tall matama fields. In an hour's time we had passed Tura Perro, or Western Tura, and had entered the forest again, whence the Wakimbu of Tura obtain their honey, and where they excavate deep traps for the elephants with which the forest is said to abound. An hour's march from Western Tura brought us to a ziwa, or pond. There were two, situated in the midst of a small open mbuga, or plain, which, even at this late season, was yet ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... and their report at once engaged the attention of the local Antiquarian Society; a small subscription list was opened, permission obtained from the owner of the property, and within a week a gang of labourers began to excavate on the cliff-top directly above the jutting cornice. The ground here showed a slight depression, and the soil proved unexpectedly deep and easy to work. On the second day, at a depth of seven feet, one of the men announced that he had come upon rock. But having spaded ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Indian to Camp One for the bearskins, put the rest to digging a trench around the sleeping tents in order that a rain storm might not cause a flood, and ordered Ginger to excavate a square hole some feet deep which he intended to utilize ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... by preference, a partly decayed tree in which to excavate a hole for its nest, because the digging is easier, and the sawdust and chips make a softer lining than green wood. Both male and female take turns in this hollowing-out process. The one that is off duty is allowed ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... surface of the ground and emptied. How long do you calculate the man will require to dig in this manner, fifty, a hundred feet? How long to sink one or two such shafts on each and every claim he has staked? How long to excavate the numerous lateral tunnels which the ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... Carree and Pont du Gard in France. Like any modern monument, these are visible to the traveller. But the majority of these monuments have been recovered from the earth, from sand, from river deposits, and from debris. One must disengage them from this thick covering, and excavate the soil, often to a great depth. Assyrian palaces may be reached only by cutting into the hills. A trench of forty feet is necessary to penetrate to the tombs of the kings of Mycenae. Time is not the only agency for covering these ruins; men have aided it. When the ancients wished to build, ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... 16 braccia wide at the bottom and 20 at the top, we may say is on the average 18 braccia wide, and if it is 4 braccia deep, at 4 dinari the square braccia; it will only cost 900 ducats, to excavate by the mile, if the square braccio is calculated in ordinary braccia; but if the braccia are those used in measuring land, of which every 4 are equal to 4 1/2 and if by the mile we understand three thousand ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... that in less than a minute after his liberation he had worked his lump into a close approximation to globular form, and had started on his voyage; but after a few turns he stopped, seemed to try the weight of his load, deliberately rolled it back into its original bed, and then began to excavate another portion, which he set himself to work into the original ball, which when weighed had been found wanting. The surface of the latter was thoroughly sanded by its revolutions, and adhesion was impossible; so he began working the new material under the coating ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... series of these workings. They consist of shafts connected together by galleries. These pits vary in size from twenty to sixty feet in diameter, and in some cases were as much as thirty feet deep. From the bottom of these shafts they would excavate as far as they dared to the sides. They made no use of timbers to support the roof, and so these side excavations were not of great extent. In these old workings the miners sometimes left behind them their tools. The principal one was a pick made ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... stratified country. It is not only true in the natural sense, as here where the clay has fallen away and left visible the very ribs of the hills. It is true in the quarries where men dig, in the dead cities where they excavate, and even in the living cities where they still fight and pray. The sorrow of all Palestine is that its divisions in culture, politics and theology are like its divisions in geology. The dividing line is horizontal instead of vertical. The frontier does not run between states but between stratified ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... severe tumbles had taken place. In the meantime the writer took the necessary levels, and having carefully examined the site of the building and considered all its parts, it still appeared to be necessary to excavate to the average depth of fourteen inches over the whole area of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her dulcet voice chiming on the ear like the stroke of a small silver bell. "None of the modern discoverers know anything about him yet. They have not even found his tomb; but he was buried in the Pyramids with all the honors of a king. No doubt your clever men will excavate him ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... livings and are tired of service. They are men under a cloud for the most part. Churches take them on, ready to fire them at a moment's notice, and keep strict watch over them while waiting for them to be interdicted or to have their celebret taken away. I simply mean that the provincial parishes excavate on the city the priests who for one reason or another have ceased ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... 1810.[42] A case once came within my own knowledge, says Mr. Mann, of a person who spent a fortune in mining for coal, when a work on geology, which would have cost but a dollar, and might have been read in a week, would have informed him that the stratum where he began to excavate belonged to a formation lower down in the natural series than coal ever is, or, according to the constitution of things, ever can be found. He therefore worked into a stratum which must have been formed before a particle of coal, or even a tree, or ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... avoidance. His own acquaintance with Davison was recent and in the way of business. He had had the fancy to build for the accommodation of his Hellenic treasures a room in imitation of the court of a Graeco-Roman house which he had helped to excavate in Asia Minor. He had commissioned Davison to buy him hangings for it to harmonize with an old Persian carpet in cream color and blue of which he was already possessed. Davison had brought these with him and a little collection of other things which he thought ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... a chance for invention. I went down cellar to reflect and investigate. I decided that a stove-pipe could be carried from a small cellar window to the old chimney base, and by prying up the thick stone hearth we could excavate beneath it a passage which would admit the pipe to one end of the fireplace, where it could be covered and made sightly by a register. Old Pop came with his crowbar and pick, and Westbury brought the galvanized pipe and the grating. ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... and prairies. They are much smaller than the Grey Wolf, and not so dangerous. They travel in bands and unitedly attack whatever animal they desire to kill. Their homes are made in burrows which they excavate in the ground. The Texan Wolf inhabits the latitude of Texas and southward. It is of a tawny red color and nearly as large as the grey species, ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... Italy and other parts of Europe, but even on sites not very far from those it is accustomed to regard as the hotbed of ancient relics—Babylonia and Assyria—there are other sites where it could profitably excavate. The immense "Salt Valley" of Dasht-Beyad by Khorasson covers the most ancient civilizations of the world; while the Shamo desert has had time to change from sea to land, and from fertile land to a dead ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... the mere verbal husk with which linguistic usage and convenience have clothed them, and which, in the course of ages, has become nothing but the dross of decomposed verbiage, and see if we can excavate the living germ, that has become buried within. If we can do so, we shall, at the commencement of our study, have attained unto a realization of the ancient meaning and real significance of the terms employed. And this will be no small gain, ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... system of wires fell."—"An important alteration has been made in the Magnetic Observatory. For several years past, various plans have been under consideration for preventing large changes of temperature in the room which contains the magnetic instruments. At length I determined to excavate a subterraneous room or cellar under the original room. The work was begun in the last week in January, and in all important points it is now finished."—"In the late spring, some alarm was occasioned by the discovery ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... present. Here are the tools. They look quite antediluvian. Do you think now that it really was a flesh-and-blood Indian we saw here; or was it the ghost of some murdered priest? And has he been digging down here to excavate his own old bones, or have a peep to see ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... reached at less than 75 feet, and it would usually be impossible to drive a pipe to such a depth. When a large quantity of water is desired, strong machines drill into the ground and excavate an opening into which a wide pipe can be lowered. I recently spent a summer in the Pocono Mountains and saw such a well completed. The machine drilled to a depth of 250 feet before much water was reached and to over 300 feet before a flow was obtained sufficient ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... chief roads of the forest, some of which were now effaced, he saw that they all ended either at the little eminence or by the pond at the foot of it, to which points travellers from Troyes, from the valley of Arcis and that of Cinq-Cygne, and from Bar-sur-Aube doubtless came. The marquis wished to excavate the hillock but he dared not employ the people of the neighborhood. Pressed by circumstances, he abandoned the intention, leaving in Michu's mind a strong conviction that the eminence had either the treasure or the foundations of the former ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... many as you may, Bring crowds on crowds to labor here; Them by reward and rigor cheer; Persuade, entice, give ample pay! Each day be tidings brought me at what rate The moat extends which here we excavate. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... lands and the deserts. Be strong to fulfil his words and the decrees that are uttered among you. Follow (?) his utterances, and ye shall be safe under his Souls. Work all together for him in every work. Haul monuments for him, excavate canals for him, work for him in the work of your hands, and there will accrue unto you his favour as well as his food daily. Amen hath decreed for him his sovereignty upon earth, he hath made this period of his life twice ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... its advantage, for at the same time he learned their languages. It was not enough to excavate the Suez Canal; it was necessary also to maintain it, as otherwise the sands of the deserts, lying on both banks, would fill it up in the course of a year. The grand work of De Lesseps demands continual labor and vigilance. So, too, at the present day, powerful ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... the kindred of the bees either construct the nests for their young in the manner of our wasps or hornets, building them entirely in the open air, or excavate underground chambers in the fashion of our bumble-bees, our domesticated form at some time in the remote past adopted the plan of choosing for its dwelling-place some chamber in the rocks, or cavity in a hollow tree which ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... like—belonging to the late owner, there is certainly no trace, for Signor Fiorelli's labourers were not the first to break the deep silence of this buried mansion. For it was the survivors of the stricken town, the citizens of Pompeii themselves, who were the foremost pioneers to excavate, and they carried off every work of art they could conveniently remove. Cutting from above into the deposit of ashes that filled the streets, they managed to reach in course of time the level of the ground, after which they tunnelled from room to room, ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... must look familiar to you, for there is so much in it that was once yours. I have two rooms, each fifteen by fifteen, but this one on the south is my "really" room and in it are my treasures. My house faces east and is built up against a side-hill, or should I say hillside? Anyway, they had to excavate quite a lot. I had them dump the dirt right before the house and terrace it smoothly. I have sown my terrace to California poppies, and around my porch, which is six feet wide and thirty long, ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... 1. Clearing out the debris: To excavate and remove 350 cubic yards of earth and debris, or less, as specified, amount of excavation not ...
— The Repair Of Casa Grande Ruin, Arizona, in 1891 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... hillside, where rows of spectators might sit one above the other, all looking down on a broad, flat space in the centre, under their feet, where the representations took place. Sometimes, when the country was flat, or it was easier to build than to excavate, the amphitheatre was raised above ground, rising up to a ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... require tools of particular construction.... In Germany it is common to excavate by vertical thrusts of the tool, the cutting part of which is represented above, fig. 2. This tool is pressed down into the peat to a depth corresponding to the thickness of the required block: its three edges cut as many sides of the block, and the bottom is then ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... this poet? He is such an erudite archaeologist that, in the seventh century, he knows and carefully describes a helmet of the Mycenaean prime. Did he excavate it? and had the leather interior lasted with the felt cap through seven centuries? Or did he see a sample in an old temple of the Mycenaean prime, or in a museum of his own period? Or had he heard of it ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... told me that hardly an hour's walk from there was a place in the woods among the mountains where an enormous quantity of bones were piled up in the sand and gravel. Ha! I exclaimed, the day is beginning to break. I went out there with a few peasants, had them excavate a little, and, behold! we came across bones to my heart's content. So that is the place where Germanicus had the remnants of the Roman legions buried six years after the battle of Teutoburg Wood, when he directed his last expeditions against Hermann. And I have therefore ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... four blocks, or rather insulate four blocks on all sides, except on the rock behind, from which they are afterward detached by hand. It has been already ascertained that each of the two machines, at the opposite ends of the tunnel, will excavate to the extent of 22 feet a day, and it is estimated that the whole excavation will be completed in four years. The gallery to be perforated by the machines will be 13 feet wide by 7 feet high, and this once cut through, the bore will be enlarged ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... our shovels," said the doctor, "an intelligent boy can excavate a trench or dig a mile of potatoes quicker than a gang of men in your day, and with no more effort than he would use in wheeling ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... digger, whose business it was to excavate for chalk, and told him the situation. The man listened, but said nothing. When she had finished ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... Indicator (and down in the slate, of course) is a still finer streak—a streak as fine as a pencil mark; and indeed, that is its name Pencil Mark. Whenever you find the Pencil Mark you know that thirty feet from it is the Indicator; you measure the distance, excavate, find the Indicator, trace it straight to the reef, and sink your shaft; your fortune is made, for certain. If that is true, it is curious. And ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... five centuries exceed By computation) it is like Our roads transformed the eye will strike; Highways all Russia will unite And form a network left and right; On iron bridges we shall gaze Which o'er the waters boldly leap, Mountains we'll level and through deep Streams excavate subaqueous ways, And Christian folk will, I expect, An inn at every ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... Peering into the shaft we could make out the floor of a tunnel some thirty feet down. To judge by its effects, this shell had been of a different type from any others whose work we had witnessed. Apparently it had been devised to excavate holes rather than to explode, and when we asked questions about it we speedily ascertained that our guide did not care to discuss the gun which had inflicted ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... was the original intention to close and excavate the east side of the avenue and to erect there a street-traffic trestle before closing the west side, but, at the contractor's request, both sides were closed, and all vehicular traffic was turned into the center. A light trestle on the ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • B.F. Cresson, Jr
... excavate sand for the builders. They are nearly all Christians, and are always at work cutting out graves for the dead of the Christians. These men have lived there all their lives, and are not only familiar with the passages, but they have a kind ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous
... entirely bound up with the locality; they possess an interest only for those who still sacrifice to Jehovah on the same altar as Abraham once did, under the same sacred oak of Moreh or Mamre. In the same way the patriarchs discover or excavate the caves, or springs, or wells, and plant the trees, which their posterity still count sacred or at least honourable, after the lapse of thousands of years. In some cases also striking or significant formations of the earth's surface receive a legendary explanation from the patriarchal age. Were ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... overhangs the small stream of the Khosr; the elevation in this part being about ninety-five feet. The area covered by the mound is estimated at a hundred acres, and the entire mass is said to contain 14,500,000 tons of earth. The labor of a man would scarcely excavate and place in position more than 120 tons of earth in a year; it would require, therefore, the united exertions of 10,000 men for twelve years, or 20,000 men for six years, to complete the structure. On this artificial eminence were raised in ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... to excavate the remainder of the section and build the iron lining in short lengths, gradually transferring the weight of the roof bars of the iron lining as the posts were taken out. This meant that not more ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • James H. Brace, Francis Mason and S. H. Woodard
... black, and their operations and manner of life are not less extraordinary. Their habitations are the inside of the branches of a tree, which they contrive to excavate by working out the pith almost to the extremity of the slenderest twig; the tree at the same time flourishing, as if it had no such inmate. When we first found the tree, we gathered some of the branches, and were scarcely less astonished than we should have been to find ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... free as possible from the local attraction of the rocks in the neighbourhood, Webb resolved to take several sets of observations on the ice-sheet. In order to make the determinations it was necessary to excavate a cave in the glacier. This was done about three-quarters of a mile south of the Hut in working shifts of two men. A fine cavern was hewn out, and there full sets of magnetic observations were taken ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... the subject, would reply, "The birds are all right, but where are the nests?" Hens very sensibly decide that it is easier to build a new house than to keep the old one in order; and having laid one round of eggs, off they go to erect, or rather to excavate, another dwelling. You have scarcely learned the way to their nook above the great beam when it is abandoned, and they betake themselves to a hole at the very bottom of the haystack. I wish I could tell you a story about a Hebrew prophet crawling under a barn after hen's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... paws are three or four inches in length, and are useful implements for digging. It is astonishing to see the result upon soil that would require a pick-axe to excavate a hole. Upon the hard sides of such pits as those made in search of white ants, the claw-marks are deeply imprinted, showing the labour that has been expended for a most trifling prize, as the nest when ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... not fix up the old shanty, but he gets a second-hand man, if he will have it, to tear it down, and he puts a mansion in its place. It is not fixing up the house that you need, but to give Christ the vacant lot, and He will excavate below our old life and build a house where He ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... of this interesting family is the little downy, Fig. 7. Living largely upon harmful grubs and insects, this bird does an immense amount of good by protecting our forests from insect scourges. Woodpeckers do not build nests as most birds do, but excavate a deep cavity in some dead tree leaving a quantity of chips at the bottom on which the eggs are laid. Nesting boxes should be of the rustic type made as shown in Fig. 12, leaving some sawdust mixed with a little earth in the cavity. These houses should be placed on trees ...
— Bird Houses Boys Can Build • Albert F. Siepert
... by the natives and the nature of the objects which they claimed to have found at this place that led Frobenius to excavate here. See pages 306-307 of his Voice of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... been located on the south side of Lookout Hill, near the lake, and work was commenced upon it late in the season. After a careful consideration of various methods for sinking the well, it was decided to build the wall and then to excavate the material from within, trusting to the weight of the wall to force it down. Sixteen feet of the wall were laid securely bolted together, before the excavation was commenced. A derrick with a boom fifty-five feet in length was set up near the wall, so that the sweep of the boom commanded ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... with the Arabs ended, and at leisure) began to look about, and thought they saw an Eldorado looming beautifully in the mirage of The Desert, which would speedily replenish their exhausted treasures, and put the Government of Tripoli in easy pecuniary circumstances. A pretext was soon found to excavate in this newly discovered Desert mine. "The people of Ghadames," said the Pashas of Tripoli, "are rebels—they sympathized with the Arabs—they did not come forward to help us to exterminate the Arabs—they ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... the diversity is greatest. Some ground species excavate in the earth like kingfishers, only with greater skill, making cylindrical burrows often four to five feet deep, and terminating in a round chamber. Others build a massive oven-shaped structure of clay on a branch or other elevated site. Many of those that creep ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... chance of either." I replied. "My idea is this. The inside of the inclosure is already deep under a frozen drift, and from the look of the weather there will be more snow in plenty within a few hours. We will excavate a tunnel beneath it, starting from one of the little windows that give air to the cellar, and leading to some part of the south stockade. Then in a day or two, when the night is dark and other conditions favorable, what is to prevent us from making our escape unseen to the forest, ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... attended to the young, worked within the open royal cells, and also watched on those that were shut. They made a waved work on them, not by applying wax cordons, but by removing wax from the surface. Towards the top this waved work is almost imperceptible; it becomes deeper above, and the workers excavate it still more from thence to the base of the pyramid. The cell, when once shut, also becomes thinner; and is so much so, immediately preceding the queen's metamorphosis from a nymph, that all its motions are perceptible through ...
— New observations on the natural history of bees • Francis Huber
... the caisson to sink and the earth to rise within it. But it is more usual to employ what is called the plenum process, in which air under high pressure is pumped into the caisson and expels the water, as in a diving bell. Workmen then descend, entering through an air lock, and excavate the ground at the bottom of the caisson, which sinks gradually as the excavation continues. Under this system a length of some two miles of quay wall is being constructed at Antwerp, far out in the channel of the river Scheldt. Here ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 417 • Various
... her was a pink pig she had been commissioned to escort down to the farm of Sant' Elia. This beast was suffering hellish torments from the heat and vainly endeavouring, with frenzied grunts of despair, to excavate for itself a hollow in the earth under a thinly clothed myrtle bush. I told the woman of shade lower down. She said she knew about it, but the pig—the pig refused to move! It had been engaged upon this hopeless occupation, without a moment's respite, for an hour or more; nothing ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... of malignant sores or ulcers on any part of the body, the doctors treated them by applying dirt or earth, and in warm weather would excavate a place in the ground and put the patient in it, either in a sitting or recumbent position, as the nature of the case required, and cover the affected part with earth for several hours, daily. Sometimes, by this mode of treatment, wonderful cures ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark
... around the edge of the nearest sand-pile; but this supplied poor protection against the storm, the wind lashing the fine grit into our faces, stinging us like bits of fire. I tried to excavate some sort of cave that might afford us at least a partial shelter; but the sand slid down almost as rapidly as I could dig ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... older erections in the island of Saad El Din, near Zayla—oblong slabs planted deep in the soil. We also observed frequent hollow rings of rough blocks, circles measuring about a cubit in diameter: I had not time to excavate them, and the End of Time could only inform me that they belonged to the ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... mine still bear on their rocky walls the marks made by the pick of the workman who toiled to excavate them. The space between each prop in the underground galleries might be marked as a miner's grave; and who can tell what each of these graves has cost, in tears, in privations, in unspeakable wretchedness to the family who depended on the scanty wage of the worker cut off in his ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... they throw off, as they never leave the nest again, and in it wings would of course be useless. The workers do not, except occasionally, lay eggs, but carry on all the affairs of the community. Some of them, and especially the younger ones, remain in the nest, excavate chambers and tunnels, and tend the young, which are sorted up according to age, so that my nests often had the appearance of a school, with the children arranged in classes. In our English ants the workers in ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... his Pompeii? Deep under ashes lies the Life of Youth,—the careless Sport, the Pleasure and Passion, the darling Joy. You open an old letter-box and look at your own childish scrawls, or your mother's letters to you when you were at school; and excavate your heart. Oh me, for the day when the whole city shall be bare and the chambers unroofed—and every cranny visible to the Light above, from the Forum to ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... little food for humans, and raw material such as wood, coal, oil, iron, copper, etc., are completely useless to humanity until after human work is applied to them. It is necessary to cut a tree for the making of timber; it is necessary to excavate the minerals, and even then, only by applying further human work is it possible to make them available for any human use. So, it is obvious that even raw materials in the form in which nature has produced them, are mostly of no value and unavailable for use, unless reproduced through ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... range of two and one-half miles, broke through a similar vault covered with ten feet of earth; but with seventeen feet of earth the vault resisted. In 1883, experiments at Kummersdorf showed that a shell containing the fifty-seven pound charge would excavate in sand a crater sixteen feet in diameter and eight feet deep, with a capacity of twenty-two cubic yards. The Italians have had similar experiences; but it is notable that in both Germany and Italy several guns and mortars have burst. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various
... serve at least till the day (if that day ever came) when it might be removed to some churchyard. They had no tools to dig a deep hole with; and if there was a hole, it must be deep: but they found they could excavate a space in the bank, under the trunk of one of the large buried forest-trees. They could line this hole with hewn stones brought from the shattered wall of the house, and could close it in also with a stone,—thus making the space at once a coffin and a grave, as secure from beast or ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau
... in to straighten up, he knew where to find everything. He knew it was somewhere in the Room and all he had to do was to excavate ...
— People You Know • George Ade |
