90 



Lesley.] A " v ' [April 3, 



guttural was not a characteristic element of the first personal pronoun. 

 And yet Gesenius seems to feel no hesitation in saying that the Hebrew 

 Anoki (ANKE) " is the primary and fuller form of Ani," being more fre- 

 quent in the Pentateuch (but in general more rare) than the shorter form 

 Ani; and in some of the later books, as the Chronicles and Ecclesiastes, 

 wholly disappearing, just as the guttural of the Saxon has been lost in mod- 

 ern English, and that of the Franks in modern French. He notices that 

 the form Anoki occurs on the Phoenician monuments and in the Chinese 

 NGO. The Sanskrit used only the guttural aha, like the Creek, Latin, 

 German, etc., while the Aramaic, Arabic, Abyssinian have lost it, and 

 use the shorter nasal form of the pronoun. It seems hardly possible, 

 therefore, to avoid the conclusion that AN"K was the primitive form of 

 the first personal pronoun, and that it stood in genetic relationship to the 

 Egyptian symbol of life, the an%. Whether the symbol was constructed 

 from the ideograph for 7 (a man with his arm bent pointing to his mouth) 

 or not, I leave to the judgment of others. 



But Gesenius remarks somewhere that Anoki is used in some Hebrew 

 passages as an emphatic I myself. This would point to the constitution of 

 the pronoun as a dissyllable, with a final KA., the well-known hieroglyph 

 for the dead man's spirit. 



I should like to draw attention to the identity of ani, the pronoun, and 

 ani, the Hebrew (and generally Shemitic) word for vessel, not only a 

 vase, urn, bucket, etc., for holding water especially, but also a ship. The 

 human frame was called a vessel (of wrath or righteousness, of mercy, 

 etc., etc.), and may easily have been originally regarded as the vessel of 

 life par excellence. Were this idea feasible, it might return us to my for- 

 mer arkite (ship-mountain-water) interpretation of the crux ansata. 



On an Important Boring Through 2000 Feet of Trias, in Eastern Pennsyl- 

 vania. By J. P. Lesley. 



(Read before the American Philosophical Society, April 3, 1S91.) 



Tlie Eastern Oil Company's trial bore-hole on the Stern farm at Revere 

 (Rufe's Corner), Bucks county, Pa., is 18 miles south of Easton, 16 miles 

 north of Doylestown, 7 miles west of Riegelsville, 5 miles from Kintners- 

 ville, 8 miles from Munroe, 10 miles from Durham furnace, 1^ miles from 

 Bucksville, 2£ miles from Ottsville, 4 miles from Ervina, and about 2 

 miles east of Haycock trap hill. 



The following record was written from dictation of Mr. E. C. Rosenzi, 

 3414 Smedley street, Tioga, Philadelphia, February 25, 1891, Superinten- 

 dent of the Company. 



This is the first deep boring in the Mesozoic belt of Pennsylvania, 



