GEOLOGY OF THE LUEAY CAVE. 207 



or difficult places upon bridges of pine planking, which rots away and 

 must be replaced every nine months. We pass successively Titania's 

 Veil, Diana's Bath — the lady was not fastidious — and come to a very 

 satisfactory Saracen Tent. 



Then we ascend stairways past the Empress Column — easily empress 

 of all, I think — and proceed under the Fallen Column to the spacious 

 nave of the Cathedral. We pause to note its lofty groined roof and 

 Gothic pillars — surely, in some like scene to this, the first architect of that 

 style met his inspiration ! — its large, Michael- Angelesque Angel's Wing, 

 and its Organ. Then we sit down and turn to the prostrate stalactite. 

 It is as big as a steamboat boiler, and bears an enormous pagoda of 

 stalagmitic rock which has grown there since it fell. It thus forms a 

 ffood text for a conversation. 



Here Dr. C. A. White, of the Smithsonian Institution, stands as au- 

 thority. The rock out of which Luray Cavern has been excavated is a 

 compact, bluish limestone, not very evenly bedded, and weathering rug- 

 gedly on account of its heterogeneous texture, a fact to which the almost 

 endless variety and irregularity to which it chiefly owes its charm is large- 

 ly due. The few fossils discovered indicate that this limestone stratum 

 is of lower silurian, probably belonging to the Trenton period. 



The position, of the cave in the middle of an open valley, distant from 

 the mountains, and so much below their crests, shows that it was hollowed 

 out towards the close of the epoch within which the formation of the 

 valley took place. The character of the erosion leads to the conviction 

 that the excavation was effected subsequently to the formation of the 

 great folds referred to at the beginning of this article, which plainly took 

 place after the close of the carboniferous period, because strata of that 

 period and those of later date are involved. 



It is thus evident that the geological date of the origin of Luray 

 Cave, although it is carved out of silurian limestone, is considerably 

 later than the close of the carboniferous period. N.one of the facts yet 

 ascertained warrant a more definite conclusion concerning the limits of 

 its antiquity than to say that the most recent epoch at which it might 

 have been formed is the tertiary. It is highly probable that the date 

 of its origin is not more ancient than that of the Mammoth Cave, or the 

 Wyandotte in southern Indiana.* 



Now these geological statements tell one the relative position which 

 the cave occupies in cosmic history, but they help the mind little in 



* See Scribner's Monthly for April and October, 1880. 



