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Vol. IV. FEBRUARY, 1895. No. 2. 



ANIMATES FOUND IN THE MiTCHElvSTOWN CAVE. 



BY GHORGK H. CARPENTER, B.SC. 

 (Read before the Dublin Naturalists' Field Club, December nth, 1894.) 



The joint meeting of the Dublin, Cork, and I^imerick Field 

 Clubs, held at Fermo}' during the past summer, will remain a 

 pleasant memory to all who were privileged to take part in it. 

 Of the various excursions undertaken on that occasion, the 

 most novel and fascinating to the majority of those present 

 was, doubtless, the exploration, on the afternoon of July 6th, 

 of the famous caverns situated in the Carboniferous lyime- 

 stone, near Mitchelstown. An interesting account of the topo- 

 graphy of these caves, illustrated by a map, has recently been 

 published^ by Rev. Courtenay Moore, Rector of Mitchelstown. 

 Upon the occasion of our visit, an early start was made from 

 Fermoy,the distance to Mitchelstown being about fifteen miles. 

 Before arriving at the entrance to the cave, our party made a 

 circuit and drove a short distance up one of the gorges on the 

 southern slope of the Galtees. This fine mountain-range 

 rising to a height of 3,000 feet, is, like most of the ranges of 

 southern Ireland which run from east to west, composed of 

 sandstones, grits, and conglomerates, ascribed to the Old Red 

 or basement- Carboniferous formation, and thrown into an 

 anticlinal fold. The synclinal areas between the ranges are 

 outcrops of the Carboniferous I^imestone, and it is on the face 

 of a hill of this rock, opposite the Galtees, at a few miles' 

 distance, and about 400 feet above sea-level, that the entrance 

 to the cave is situated. The excavation of such caves in lime- 

 stone through the chemical action of gases dissolved in subter- 

 ranean streams, and their subsequent adornment with stalactites 

 and stalagmites by the deposition of salts held in solution by 



\/ourn. Cork Hist, Arch> Soc. vol. iii., 1894, pp. 1-5. 



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