256 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the large bones taken from the caverns near Baireuth, in Bavaria, 

 were not those of human giants, but of extinct animals, and he called 

 them, they being petrified by limestone, zooliths, or animal-stones; 

 and it was his remarks upon them that drew Cuvier's attention to 

 paleontology. 



Three sciences have of late years been advanced by the explora- 

 tions of caves: paleontology; prehistory, or research among the re- 

 mains of primitive men and their industries; and zoology, or the 

 study of living beings. The animals of caverns — crustaceans, in- 

 sects, batrachians, and fishes — constitute a special fauna, which has 

 been for fifty years a subject of study to naturalists of various na- 

 tions, and to the anatomy of which M. Armand Vire, of the Natural 

 History Museum of Paris, has been giving special attention for five 

 years past. 



There are other sciences the study of which in connection with 

 caves, while capable of yielding valuable fruits, has been too long 

 neglected: geology, for their origin and formation; mineralogy, for 

 their relations to metallic veins; meteorology, for thermometrical 

 and barometrical variations and the formation of carbonic acid; ter- 

 restrial physics, for the experiments on gravity that might be car- 

 ried on in deep vertical pits, supplementing the observations of Fou- 

 cault in the Pantheon at Paris, and Airy in the English mines; 

 hydrology, which has hardly yet perceived that caves are predomi- 

 nantly great laboratories of springs; agriculture, which might trans- 

 form them into reservoirs for times of drought or storage basins in 

 case of flood; and public hygiene, which is just beginning to discover 

 that they may harbor in their fissures hitherto unsuspected causes of 

 contamination of the water of the springs that issue from them. The 

 number and importance of these new problems that have arisen from 

 the recent extension of underground investigations seem fully to jus- 

 tify the specialization of the science of caves — another creation of the 

 Speleological Society, now four years old. This special interest in 

 the science of caves began about fifteen years ago, when, in 1883, 

 three members of the Austro-German Alpine Club — Herren Harske, 

 Marinitsch, and Miiller — resumed in the limestone plateaus of Istria 

 and Carniola called the Karst, explorations which had been actively 

 and profitably carried on in the middle of the century, from 1850 

 to 1857, by Dr. Adolf Schmidt, whose discoveries in the caves of 

 Adelsberg, Planina, and St. Canzion won him a membership in the 

 Vienna Academy of Sciences. Their efforts and those of Herr F. 

 Kraus, who died last year, had the result of interesting the Austrian 

 Government in the subject; and since 1886 various engineers have 

 been commissioned by the Minister of Agriculture to make official 

 explorations and construct economical works in the caves and under- 



