88 RESOURCES OF CALIFORNIA. 
§ 60. Caves—There are a number of caves in California. 
Of these the most noted are the Alabaster 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- 
can 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 falls fourteen hundred feet 
within a mile; and one of three hundred feet, called the “ Riffle- 
box Falls,” in Deer Creek, Nevada county. 
California has five natural bridges. The largest of these is 
on a smaall creek emptying into the Hay Fork of the Trinity 
