Charlevoix county herald., 1921-05-27

They went back 100000 years in
digging down ten feet on the property
of the Torrance Lime and Fertilizer
company, just outside Torrance, Cal.
DR.. c. l.. Edwards head of the ma
ture study department Of the Los An
geles schools; l.. e. Sandos, chemical
expert, and S. Maus Purple, general
manager OF the company, spent the
morning examining and appraising
the various bone, shell and rock spec
linens as they came up in the course
Of q series of excavations which prom
Use to be among the most important
made In Southern California.
Although undertaken solely for COM
mercial purposes and with a view to
putting on the market the 5,OOO,OOO
tons Of the highly valuable decom-
posed marine shell lime on the tract
owned by the company, the eXcava-
tons have produced marine remains
covering q period of from 100000 to
100000 years before this era and
have also yielded a portion of an i'm
mense pelvic bone believed to have
been part of the most gigantic animal
that ever walked the earth.
Drama of 100000 Years.
In those ten feet of lime deposits
is packed the recurring drama of l.
100000 years. There was the bed of
the ocean as attested by innumerable
shell and fish deposits. There in the
course of tens of thousands of years
great sharks battled, falling locked in
the death embrace to the bottom of
the sea. There, after the waters had
vanished and vegetation had sprung
up, were large trees, portions of the
forest remaining petrified amid other
relics older by hundreds of thousands
Of years.
There, in tens of thousands of
years, the imperial elephant, standing
over fourteen feet in height and prob
ably weighing three tons, went down
to his watering place, failed on one
bright day or one dark night to watch
his step and begged one foot in a
lime pit struck out in anger with an
other foot and his trunk, got those
caught also and passed out of life in
to geology.
However, before the elephant had
persisted in the mire the saber-toothed
tiger pounced upon him, sinking his
12-inch teeth into the helpless victim.
Relinquishing his grip when satiated,
he dropped contentedly toward what
he thought would be solid ground
emily to sink into the same pit with
the elephant and to join that immense
creature and the sharks and the in
fnitesimal shell forms in furnishing a
story book which would be opened
with pick and shovel some day any
number of thousands of years later.
TunneIed Foot by Foot.
And the great wolf, too, prowled
and fed there, and persisted there
also as his bones, along with those of
the rest, testify. Then, almost yes
terday 1t seems, in contrast with the
far-reaching records in the pits, a
famished and desperate man came
there seeking water and some roots.
With only crude tools-perhaps 1t
was less than 5000 years ago or it
may have been shortly before the
coming Of the white man to this con-
tinent-he hit upon the frantic idea of
digging back to the source of little
stream. And so he tunneled in, pain
full foot by painful foot, using a clum'
ey, heavy shale scraper, not unlike a
large arrowhead in shape.
They found traces Of him, too, re-
Gently, a few bones mingled with
those of the shark, the tiger and the
wolf, his heavy spade little ahead of
him.
Out of the depths of the same
spring toward which he was striving
the excavating party drank cool
bracing water in abundance. The
rock that had bafIled him still acted
as a cistern, but it had been tapped
with modern tools for modern men,