Barkis Be j ore the Daivn ^6j 



I have often sat on the banks of such a river and, wondering how 

 deep it might be, have tried to calculate the cost of having a large 

 enough net constructed of wire cable to stretch completely across 

 it from side to side and from three feet above its surface to its bot- 

 tom. Having computed this cost and accepted it as theoretically pos- 

 sible, I have then many times considered the recruiting of sufficient 

 labor to transport the net there and sink it, together with a similar 

 net farther upstream, and then bombing the intervening water with 

 some novel form of depth charge. I then considered, further, the 

 assembly of a fleet of small river boats, with trained crews, to drag 

 the upstream net down to the downstream net and join the two. 

 Finally, I contemplated the purely mechanical problem of getting 

 the resultant mass — weighing a minimum of fifty tons, I once esti- 

 mated, in the case of a very small river — to either bank for examina- 

 tion. These are nice mental exercises, for although such projects 

 could presumably be devised and carried out, who is going to pay for 

 them? Yet without such an elaborate eflfort, repeated over and over 

 again, we will never really know just what does live in the great, 

 muddy, tropical rivers. Natives once brought me a giant rayfish, 

 measuring ten feet across, from a river on the banks of which I had 

 lived for six months and by which other Europeans had dwelt for 

 some time and the natives for thousands of years. None of us had 

 ever seen anything like it before, and the locals were just as amazed 

 as I was. Perhaps there are Acrodelphids still cruising the oceans, 

 Zeuglodonts browsing in lakes, lochs, and fjords, the ancestors of 

 these in tropical rivers, and even some "First Ancestors" on their 

 banks. 



Let us not forget that only one state in this great Union is properly 

 mapped — Massachusetts, that the island of Corsica proved to be 

 dozens of miles out of place on all maps when used as a starting point 

 for bomb runs on Italy in the last war, that there are swamps over 

 twenty thousand square miles in extent in Africa and in South 

 America that have never even been penetrated by man, and finally, 

 that almost three quarters of the surface of our entire earth is cov- 

 ered by oceans which are, on an average, about two and a half miles 

 deep while only half a dozen men have ever been below half a mile 

 anywhere in this vastness. Let us also realize that the dot on an "i" in 

 the word "Pacific" on a map of that ocean in the average school atlas 



