612 
formation was connected together like solid steel, and that the whole thing has heen 
slowly cut out of the craqka and crevices hy the agency of water percolation, holding a 
modicum of carbonic acid in solution. 
“ The tale of the economic value contained in these caves may well come in here. 
Capitalists, sighing for profit able investments, sink to the knees at every step in the 
most fructifying of all materials, consisting of deep deposits of bat exuviae that must 
have taken millions of years to accumulate, mixed with a flocculent lime powder that 
slowly drops from the rock faces, and is the undoubted agency that has melted them 
away. If all this be true of mere naked nothingness, enormous vacuity, black and 
murky midnight darkness, what shall be said when you begin to see these walla clothed 
in snowy whiteness, the niches filled with the nicest carved statuettes, the arched 
alcoves framed in the most unique of alabaster pilasters, the floors studded with the 
rarest forms of marble columns, the roofs an inverted forest of pendent cones, and the 
tout ensemble a glittering mass of .saccharine, granular, glancing, acicular crystals, 
beyond the power of pencil to paint, designer to plan, or heart to conceive. 
“ Our party was the first of the public to conquer the ‘ deep sink.’ Progression 
was like gasteropoda, and, feet foremost, through the narrow tunnel, deep down a series 
of perpendicular ladder-flights, lashed together with iron wire. At the bottom of this 
series of caves there is a burst of exclamation of mingled astonishment, rapture, and 
delight. The wide floor is covered with shells, like a sea shore, crunch-crunching at 
every step. But the chief feature is a perennial bubbling fountain, like a cold-wmter 
geyser, that has built a wide mound, in a succession of tiny terraces. The structure of 
these overflowing circles is of the cellular rhomboid form of the inside coating of a 
bullock’s stomach, and has been named ‘ tripe-stone.’ Prom numerous dried-up 
formations of this shape, throughout all the caves, we have the evidence of very much 
of this work having been done in the past. It is a petrifying spring. The water is as 
clear as glass, as cold as ice, tasteless, and palatable. This is where the fossils are 
found ; and the samples show every stage of the process — the bright bands of the 
scrolled shells beginning to bo coated, others deeply incrusted, and some turned to balls 
of solid marble. The teeth in the skulls and the incrusted shank bones are very 
remarkable and deeply interesting, for these are the things that Science asks for, and 
care will be taken that they will be placed in proper hands. A.ny object you desire to 
be turned into stone, from a human being to a spider’s web, has simply to be immersed 
for a time on the shelves of these terraces, in that lime-water. 
“But Nature has built the most handsome of all her ornaments, the chastest, 
most delicate, superb, and beautiful of these cave treasures away up in the most secret 
recess of the ‘ benmast bore.’ 
“A s high up again as you have descended, overhead high benches and long, sloping 
moraines — in an upper corner a great cluster of twin wavy, stalasso, in projected 
canopy, semi-circular form, joined to the wall with the widest, deepest, folded curtain 
drapery of the most curious dendritic weaving that ever eyes saw. 
“ We visited the Crystal Cave, replete with the most magnificent slabs of com- 
pressed, pure ealcite crystals.’’ 
Mr. Smith sent me a small collection (now in the Geological Survey Museum) of 
bones dug by him from the stalagmitic floor of Johannsen’s Cave, together with the 
following notes by Mr. C. W. De Vis, dated 1887 : — 
Nos. 
184. Chip from inner fore side of right radius of Morse. 
185. Eight femur of young Kangaroo Eat {M-ypsifrimnus sp.). Unless the Eockhampton species 
differs much from the common M. rwfescens and M, Greyi, this bone is significant. 
