Then the
remainder of the intervening sand can be shovelled away, and the mass,
now resting directly upon the sledge, can be dragged away by a team of
cattle.
A sarcophagus of immense weight was raised from out of a deep recess into
which it had been fitted pretty closely, at the end of a long narrow
gallery in an Egyptian tomb, where there was no room for the application
of tackle or other machinery, by the simple expedient of slightly
disturbing it in its place and sifting sand into the narrow interval
between its sides and the recess. This process was repeated continually:
the sand settled below the bottom of the sarcophagus, which gradually
rose out of the hole in which it had lain. The principle of this piece of
engineering was borrowed, I suppose, from observing that whenever a mass
of sand and stones is shaken together, the stones invariably rise out of
the sand, the biggest of them always forming the highest layer.
Expansive Power of Wetted Seeds.--Admiral Sir E. Belcher read a curious
paper before the British Association in 1866, showing the remarkable
power to be obtained by filling tubes with peas or other seed, allowing
the weight to rest upon the surface of the peas through the medium of a
rude piston. When the peas were wetted they swelled upwards with
considerable force. A pint of peas placed in a tube of a diameter that
was not expressed in the newspaper report, from which I take this
account, lifted 60 lbs.
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