KENTUCKY AND HER CAVE MEN 



229 



ranean vaults, constituting a world in 

 themselves. 



Here the mere tourist as well as the 

 chemist, the geologist, the palaeontol- 

 ogist, the botanist, and the naturalist 

 could get enough ma- 

 terial each for a great 

 book. Consequently it 

 is almost useless for us 

 to enter even one cave 

 for purposes of de- 

 scription. Many other 

 hands have tried it. 

 We are told that more 

 than four hundred 

 books, pamphlets, sci- 

 entific treatises, and 

 magazine articles have 

 been printed about the 

 Mammoth Cave alone ; 

 and among the great 

 variety of talent so em- 

 ployed have been such 

 "wordpickers" as Na- 

 thaniel Willis and pos- 

 sibly Bayard Taylor. 

 But no two visitors to 

 this wonder of the 

 New World are im- 

 pressed equally by the 

 same phenomena. For 

 myself, the cave as a 

 cave excited no un- 

 usual interest ; while 

 the cave as a century- 

 old repository of slowly 

 accumulated historic 

 and biographic facts, 

 of wit and humor and 

 imaginative interpre- 

 tation, handed down in the form of 

 place names and in the more or less apt 

 remarks flowing from the lips of our 

 jovial guide, struck me forcibly. Many 

 of his remarks were naive, even far- 

 fetched, but when people climb moun- 

 tains or explore caves, the usual 



conventions are dropped and it is per- 

 missible to laugh at even a poor joke. 

 I shall not relate the guide's stories; 

 and such place names as Star Chamber, 

 Gothic Avenue, Pillars of Hercules, 



One can imagine something of the feelings of the explorer who, after 

 crawling through a small hole some five hundred feet within the en- 

 trance of the Mammoth Cave, unexpectedly found himself within this 

 enormous chamber, twenty-six to forty feet wide and three hundred 

 feet long, with walls rising abruptly to a height of seventy-eight feet. 

 A renewed sense of man's relative insignificance is borne in \ipon ns 

 as we enter the portals of "Vaughn's Dome." Courti'si/ of John P. 

 Morton d- Company, Louisville 



Bunker Hill, Martha Washington's 

 Statue, Snowball Eoom, Pineapple 

 Bush, Corkscrew, Scotchman's Trap, 

 Dog Hole, Giant's Coffin, Fat Man's 

 Misery, Lover's Leap, and Mummy 

 Xiche, are all more or less suggestive 

 and self-explanatory, at least on paper. 



