88 RESOURCES OF CALIFORNIA. 



§ 60. Caves. — There are a numbv^r of caves in California. 

 Of these the most noted are the Ahibaster Cave, seven miles 

 from Auburn, in Placer county ; the Bower Cave, twelve miles 

 from Coulterville, in Mariposa county ; the Cave of Skulls, in 

 Calaveras county; and the Santa Cruz Cave, two miles from 

 the town of Santa Cruz. The Alabaster Cave has two cham- 

 bers : one about one hundred feet long by twenty-five wide ; 

 the other two hundred feet long by one hundred wide. It 

 contains a large number of brilliant stalactites and stalagmites. 

 The Bower Cave has a chamber one hundred feet long by 

 ninety wide; it is reached by an entrance seventy feet long, 

 and in one place only four feet wide. The Santa Cruz Cave 

 has no beauty to render it attractive. The Cave of Skulls is 

 remarkable for having contained, when first discovered, a num- 

 ber of human skulls and bones, all covered with layers of car- 

 bonate or sulphate of lime, from the thickness of a leaf to an 

 inch. These bones are now in the cabinet of the Smithsonian 

 Institute. At Cave City, and seven miles from Murphy's, in- 

 Calaveras county, is a cave in which a Know-Nothing lodge 

 was accustomed to meet in 1855. In the bluff bank of the 

 Middle Fork of the Cosumnes River, eighty feet above the 

 stream, is a cavern, called Limestone Cave, with many intri- 

 cate passages and some fine stalactites. 



§ 61. Waterfalls. — Besides the cascades of the Yosemite 

 valley, there are a number of others in the state. There is a 

 cataract, about five hundred feet high, on Fall River, which 

 empties into the Middle Fork of Feather River ; one of three 

 hundred and eighty feet, where the South Fork of the Ameri- 

 ■^an River slides down over a convex rock, looking like a streak 

 of snow when seen from a distance ; one of sixty feet, in the 

 San Antonio River, in Calaveras county ; another of seventy- 

 five, on the same stream, which fiiUs fourteen hundred feet 

 within a mile ; and one of three hundred feet, called the " Riffle- 

 box Falls," in Deer Creek, ISTevada county. 



California has five natural bridges. The largest of these is 

 on a small creek emptying into the Hay Fork of the Trinity 



