“Streams and true springs are absent, but there are hundreds of basins, varying from one to fifty feet in diameter, and from six inches to fifteen feet in depth. The water in them is exquisitely pure, except as it is impregnated by the carbonate of lime, which often forms concretions called, according to their size, pearls, eggs, and snow- balls. A large one is known as the Cannon-Ball. When fractured, these spherical growths are found to be radiated in structure. Calcite crystals, drusy, feathery, or fern-like, line the sides and bottoms of every water-filled cavity, and, indeed, constitute the substance of which they are formed. Variations of level at different periods are marked by rings, ridges, and ruffled margins. These are especially strongly marked about Broaddus Lake, and the curved ramparts of the Castles on the Rhine. Here, also, are polished stalagmites, a rich buff slashed with white, and others, like huge mushrooms, with a velvety coat of red, purple, or olive-tinted crystals. In some of the smaller basins it sometimes happens that when the excess of carbonic acid escapes rapidly there is formed, besides the crystal beds below, a film above, shot like a sheet of ice across the surface. One pool twelve feet wide is thus covered so as to show but a third of its surface. The quantity of water varies greatly at different seasons; hence some stalactites have their tips under water long enough to allow tassels of crystal to grow on them, which in a drier season are again coated over with stalactitic matter, by which singular distortions are occasioned. Contiguous stalactites are often enwrapped thus till they assume an almost globular form, through which, by making a section, the primary tubes appear. Twig-like projections, lateral outgrowths, to which the term _helictite_ has been applied, are met with in certain portions of the cave, and are interesting by reason of their strange and uncouth contortions. Their presence is partly due to the existence of a diminutive fungus peculiar to the locality, and designated from its habitat, _Mucor Stalactitis_. The Toy Shop is an amusing collection of these freaks of nature. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: