File:The American Museum journal (c1900-(1918)) (18161762611).jpg

Title: The American Museum journal
Identifier: americanmuseumjo17amer (find matches)
Year: c1900-(1918) (c190s)
Authors: American Museum of Natural History
Subjects: Natural history
Publisher: New York : American Museum of Natural History
Contributing Library: American Museum of Natural History Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
KENTUCKY AND HER CAVE MEN 229 ranean vaults, constituting a world in themselves. Here the mere tourist as well as the chemist, the geologist, the palaeontol- ogist, the botanist, and the naturalist could get enough ma- terial each for a great book. Consequently it is almost useless for us to enter even one cave for purposes of de- scription. Many other hands have tried it. We are told that more than four hundred books, pamphlets, sci- entific treatises, and magazine articles have been printed about the Mammoth Cave alone; and among the great variety of talent so em- ployed have been such "wordpickers" as Na- thaniel Willis and pos- sibly Bayard Taylor. But no two visitors to this wonder of the New World are im- pressed equally by the same phenomena. For myself, the cave as a cave excited no un- usual interest; while the cave as a century- old repository of slowly accumulated historic and biographic facts, of wit and humor and imaginative interpre- tation, handed down in the form of place names and in the more or less apt remarks flowing from the lips of our jovial guide, struck me forcibly. Many of his remarks were naive, even far- fetched, but when people climb moun- tains or explore caves, the usual conventions are dropped and it is per- missible to laugh at even a poor joke. I shall not relate the guide's stories; and such place names as Star Chamber, Gothic Avenue, Pillars of Hercules,
Text Appearing After Image:
One can imagine something of the feelings of the explorer who, after crawling through a small hole some five hundred feet within the en- trance of the Mammoth Cave, unexpectedly found himself within this enormous chamber, twenty-six to forty feet wide and three hundred feet long, with walls rising abruptly to a height of seventy-eight feet. A renewed sense of man's relative insignificance is borne in \ipon ns as we enter the portals of "Vaughn's Dome." Courti'si/ of John P. Morton d- Company, Louisville Bunker Hill, Martha Washington's Statue, Snowball Eoom, Pineapple Bush, Corkscrew, Scotchman's Trap, Dog Hole, Giant's Coffin, Fat Man's Misery, Lover's Leap, and Mummy Xiche, are all more or less suggestive and self-explanatory, at least on paper.

Note About Images