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12.

spade about 4-5x7-8 inches with a wooden shaft more than ten feet long. When any trace of this plant is found, the spade is used to dig a hole, following the stem of the plant down till the root is reached, the dimension of the square hole is exactly that of the width of the spade; it goes almost straight down, the angle of slope seldom exceeds ten degrees. The soil taken out is placed right on the side of the hole. When we discovered this device, we felt that we might make profitable use of it, and immediately a number of these workmen were hired to dig trial pits after this fashion.
  The method of circumscription had proved to us a failure, we decided to abandon it and adopted the method of concentration, namely concentrating the whole working force at a point where surface finds were the most abundant. At the same time trial holes were dug to test the underground conditions by means of the long-shaft spades. The shaft was graduated with two feet intervals; the soil taken out was heaped in a serial order according to the depth, every two feet made a heap, and every heap at a definite place so that it might be recognized at a glance. This experiment was first tried in the cornfield which is rectangular in shape; a cross was drawn, starting from the four corners. The holes were dug on the cross line; every hole ten feet apart from the other.
  On the fourteenth, we opened pit 5,6,7,8,9,10; altogether six in number. Of the six pits only pit 9 yielded some tiny broken fragments of the lettered bones, the biggest size about a square inch and the small ones only that of a fingernail. Acording to the workmen, this place must have been turned more than ten times in the past, what we got this time is only some [[underline]]caput mortum.[[/underline]] This indeed gave us a ray of hope, but our disappointment was also doubled.