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Show FIND REPTILES IN SOLID ROCK Finding toads, frogs and fishes hun dreds and over a thousand feet below be-low the surface of the earth and embedded in the center of a compact mass of seeming impervious rock was the subject of conversation among a group of old mining men gathered one day this week in a Salt Lake office. of-fice. One well known Salt Lake mining man said: "When I was a boy I was knocking around the old camp of Silver Sil-ver Reef down in Washington county near Leeds The formation ther is a sandstone with silver values disseminated dis-seminated all through fixed zones of the rock 'While 1 was there a shift was 'invlng off Into the solid formation After putting in a shot the muckers reiurning to the face to clean away the debris were scared stiff on hearing hear-ing a deep, bass croak issuing from a rift made by the explosion. The men rushed out and reported that ihf devil or something of the kind had been dug up and was yelling at them Some of the more courageous miners cautiouslv tiptoed back to Investigate They heard nothing. More candles were brought and finally the men dug out a dead frog That was at a point 200 feet vertically from the upper 6lde of a solid sandstone bed No. 1 did not see the frog, but I was afterwards af-terwards shown the sort of shell nest, or hibernating place which he had evidently smoothed out by his long sojourn in the bowels of the earth . In this same Utah camp petrified trees and stumps were ring out of the sandstone with silver encrustations encrusta-tions sticking out all over them One of these day when that country gets a railroad you will see Silver Reel blossom out as a great steam shovel silver camp." That story of the Silver Reef frog reminds me of a story that Park City miners told me twenty or twenty-five year ago, ' said another mining man They were at that time cutting a station In the Silver King It was on the 1500 level The formation was a tight quartzite Reliable miners up there old me that a blast brought out of the solid rock a fish. The f(6h was dead But the remarkable thing about it was that It was bleeding when picked up by the astonished miners " Another mining man told ibis story "I never saw It. but several miners from Pioche told me that when fhe were mining in the old Meadow Valley Val-ley thirtv to forty years ago tbev struck a eubfprranean stream on the 1200-foot level In the water they picked out fine fish. The fish were ullve and healthy, but all of them were blind " |