COLOSSAL CAVERN  , a cave in Kentucky, U.S.A., the main entrance of which is at the foot of a steep hill beyond Eden Valley, and 11 m. from Mammoth Cave . It is connected with what has long been known as the Bed Quilt Cave . Several entrances found by local explorers were rough and difficult . They were closed when the property was bought in 1896 by the Louisville & Nashville railway and a new approach made as indicated on the accompanying map . From the surface to the floor is 240 ft.; under Chester Sandstone and in the St Louis Limestone . Fossil corals fix the geological age of the rock . The temperature is uniformly 54° Fahr., and the atmosphere is optically and chemically pure . Lovely incrustations alternate with queer and grotesque figures . There are exquisite gypsum rosettes and intricately involved helictites . Copyright t9v3 & 1go7 by H.C . Hooey - Old Entrance EmeryWalker sc . Tremendous forces have been at work, suggesting earthquakes and eruptions; but really all is due to the chemical and mechanical action of water .

The so-called " Ruins of

Carthage " fill a hall 400 ft. long by Too ft. wide and 30 ft. high, whose flat roof is a vast homogeneous limestone block . Isolated detached blocks measure from 50 to Too ft. in length . Edgar Vaughan and W . L . Marshall, civil engineers, surveyed every part of the cave . Vaughan's Dome is 40 ft. wide, 300 ft. long, and 79 ft. high . Numerous other domes exist, and many deep pits . The grandest place of all is the Colossal Dome, which used to beentered only from the apex by windlass and a rope reaching 135 ft. to the floor . This is now used only for illumination by raising and lowering a fire-basket . The present entrance is by a gateway buttressed by alabaster shafts, one of which, 75 ft. high, is named Henry Clay's Monument . The dome walls arise in a series of richly tinted rings, each 8 or To ft. thick, and each fringed by stalactites . The symmetry is remarkable, and the reverberations are strangely musical .

The Pearly

Pool, in a chamber near a pit 86 ft. deep, glistens with countless cave pearls . The route beyond is between rows of stately shafts, and ends in a copious chalybeate spring . Blind flies, spiders, beetles and crickets abound; and now and then a blind crawfish darts through the waters; but as compared with many caverns the fauna and flora are not abundant . It is conjectured, not without some reason, that there is a connexion, as yet undiscovered, between the Colossal and the Mammoth caves . It seems certain that Eden Valley, which now lies between them, is a vast " tumble-down " of an immense cavern that formerly united them into one . (H . C .