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3rd edn addenda, page 230:-
But a couple of hundred yards above this another cavern
opens, much more astonishing than the others. The first
approach to this presents a perpendicular descent from
nearly a level surface, beautifully bordered with trees and
shrubs, which nature seems to have meant as a guard as well
as beauty. On one side you may descend, by crawling from one
broken stratum of rock to another, till you are twenty yards
beneath the surface: In the descent one may rest between the
projecting parts of the rock, or creep many yards
horizontally between them, where we shall find the rocks and
stones encrusted with spar, and the cavernous part filled
with petrifactions in the shape of shells, moss, icicles,
&c. Most of the sparry and roof incrustations, I take to be
the fine particles of the limestone dissolved by the
rain-water, in its descent through the rocks, which sinking
slowly through the roof of these caverns, the water
evaporates, and leaves the fine particles of stone to
concrete behind; forming hollow conic figures on the roof,
or if they fall on the bottom of the cavern, form those
knobs of calcarious fossil, which cut off horizontally, are
polished into curiously variegated slabs. That the same
impregnated waters falling on shells, fish-bones, &c. should
in time displace the calcarious matter of which these are
naturally formed, and that these stony particles should in
time assume the same shape and form the shells, bones,
snakes, &c. so commonly found in limestone countries, I
cannot say I am so clear in.- May it not be, that nature has
ordained, that particles of such and such properties,
meeting with a proper nidus in the bowels of the earth, and
similar to that in which they may assemble on the outside of
an animal, may run into the same forms, and amuse us with
the shape of cockles, limpets, snakes, &c. formed in the
middle of rocks?
But to resume our journey down this amazing cavern.- After
descending from ledge to ledge in a retrograde motion,
through arches of prodigious rocks, thrown together by the
rude but awful hand of nature; at the depth of 70
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