The Mammoth Cave and Its Inhabitants

AFTER the adjournment of the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Indianapolis, in August last, a large number of the members availed themselves of the generous invitation of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company, to visit this world renowned cave, and examine its peculiar formation and singular fauna. The cave is in a hill of the subearboniferous limestone formation in Edmondson County, a little to the west and south of the centre of Kentucky. Green river, which rises to the eastward in about the centre of the state, flows westward passing in close proximity to the cave, and receiving its waters thence flows northwesterly to the Ohio. The limestone formation in which the cave exists, is a most interesting and important geological formation, corresponding to the mountain limestone of the European geologists, and of considerable geological importance in the determination of the western coal fields. We quote the following account of this formation from Major S. S. Lyon's report in the fourth volume of the Kentucky Geological Survey, pages 509-10.