B


 REPORT OF BOARD OF CONSULTING ENGINEERS,' PANAMA CANAL. 327
 modern machinery; that is, machinery for unloading material and spreading it from the shoulder of the dump. A large part of that work had to be done by hand.
 The CHAIRMAN. What estimation do you place o'n the value of the locomotives, cars, cranes, hoisting and conveying devices, and other apparatus which the French company used there-1 mean its value for future use?
 Mr. DAUCHY. I should not place any value upon it, except possibly the locomotives, to the extent that they might be used for switching purposes in a few cases, but I can not recall any cases now where that would be very desirable. The cars I do not think are of any value whatever, and the cranes, while they are good machines, are not at all adapted to the work there.
 The CHAIRMAN. Is there any form of American or modern dumping car, English, German, or French, that you think would be valuable there?
 Mr. DAUCHY. No, sir. My opinion is that no form of a dumping car is desirable there, where the material is to be handled on the kind of dumps that we have been working. If it is to be dumped into scows to be carried out to sea, a dumping car would probably be valuable; but my idea of the handling of that material is that it should be handled wholly on flat cars and unloaded by scraping it off with ballast unloaders.
 The CHAIRMAN. In handling that material in the past, how much of it did you shovel out of the cars?
 Mr. DAUCHY. During wet weather we shovel practically all of the clayey material. When it is wet, none of it will clear itself from the car. During dry weather, most of it will clear itself.
 Mr. RIPLEY. In wet weather would the clay clear itself from the dipper of the shovel?
 Mr. DAUCHY. It always bothered a little by sticking to the dipper.
 The CHAIRMAN. The character of the material that you have seen excavated-the rock, for example, the portion of that rock that you would call hard rock, that is in the side of the exposed faces of the Culebra-what portion of it would not crumble when exposed to the air? What percentage of it?
 Mr. DAUCHY. Well, of that now exposed I should say two-thirds of it would be considered hard rock.
 The CHAIRMAN. Hard rock that you would expect to encounter in widening and deepening the cut? I am discriminating between hard and soft rock.
 Mr. DAUCHY. I do not know that I get your idea. Do you mean as to facility of handling it, or in regard to crumbling?
 The CHAIRMAN. I will state it another way. Those who have previously estimated on the quantities of material to be taken out in completing the Panama Canal have classified that material as of three kinds-hard rock, soft rock, and earth. Now, the soft rock is that material which at home would be called indurated clay. What I was asking about was the first of those three, the hard rock, not the indurated clay.
 Mr. DAUCHY. From that standpoint there would be much less than I said. I think we have made estimates showing that, but I have not got it in mind at present. The great bulk of the material we call rock is soft rock as respects handling it.
 The CHAIRMAN. Now, as to the soft rock and the earth, the former being that class of material which generally has to be shot before the shovel can handle it, and the cost of handling that, including the mining expenses, as compared with earth, which of those two materials is the cheaper to handle?
 Mr. DAUCHY. Soft rock is cheaper than the clay.
 The CHAIRMAN. So that you would really fix a unit price for removing the earth at a figure quite equal to that of the soft rock?
 Mr. DAUCHY. Yes.
 The CHAIRMAN. With good drainage, would it cost as much to remove the earth as the soft rock?
 Mr. DAUCHY. I think it would always during the wet weather. In the dry weather, after we have the facilities for unloading the cars with plows and all that in operation, I think very likely the earth could be handled cheaper than the soft rock.