172 GLEANINGS FROM NATURE. 



Like other Carabids, these small blind beetles are 

 supposed to be carnivorous. In Wyandotte specimens 

 of mites, spiders, spring-tails and har- 

 vestmen were taken in the same lo- 

 cality as the beetles, and probably 

 furnish the latter a scanty supply of 

 food. 



Retracing our steps to the Junction 

 Room, we took the south-west passage, 

 the first room entered -being the "Frost 

 King's Palace," eight feet high and 



Fig. 36-Blind Beetle. , . , , . 



(After Packard.) twenty wide, where every object, great 

 (Enlarged 3* times.) and S mall, is encrusted with spark- 

 ling crystals of gypsum. To one side is the "Bridal 

 Chamber," and therein are found some of the finest of 

 the gypsum rosettes for which the cave is noted. Sev- 

 eral of these are four and a half inches in diameter, 

 the slender crystals forming them having protruded 

 from the pores in the magnesian limestone, and then, 

 uniting into fibrous masses, have curved inward to 

 form the oulopholites, or curl-leaved stones, each of 

 which bears a close resemblance to a true rosette. 



The "Ice House" is a rough-floored room where 

 dripping water from the roof has covered the surface 

 of the rocks with a film or coating of the thinnest and 

 most translucent of calcite, resembling ice. Leaving 

 the opening to the "Unexplored Regions" on our 

 left, we descended from the Ice Room into "Morton's 

 Marble Hall," 1,100 feet in length, the sides and walls 

 of which "are completely dressed in snowy whiteness, 

 equaling the brightest marble halls of dreamland, 

 song or story." Occasional nodules of jet-like flint 



