Horace Carter Hovey
Published: 2015-08-04
Total Pages: 68
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Excerpt from Hovey's Hand-Book of the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky: A Practical Guide to the Regulation Routes A Personal Word. I imbibed an early taste for the sciences from my father, the late Professor Edmund Otis Hovey, D. D., one of the founders of Wabash College, and a pioneer geologist in Indiana. My annual vacations, during a busy professional career spanning over fifty years, have largely been given to underground explorations. When fifteen years old I began cave-hunting amid the charming grottoes near Madison, Indiana. An enthusiastic comrade, six years my senior, then proposed that we visit the Mammoth Cave. For certain reasons, while he went on, I got no farther at that time than Louisville; where, however, I bought, at the bookstore of Morton and Griswold, a copy of "Rambles in the Mammoth Cave, by a Visitor." It was just out. It fired my boyish imagination, and it gave shape to much of my after life. More than four hundred books, pamphlets, scientific reports, and magazine articles have been published by different writers, besides innumerable newspaper contributions, about Kentucky's great cavern. Copies of most of these are in the authors library. Yet there is a demand, and there seems to be room, for such a practical, condensed, and up-to-date hand-book as is now offered. It does not claim to tell all that might be told; and it omits much material that might interest the historian or the scientist. Its design is to aid the average visitor as he follows the four regulation routes by which the Cave is ordinarily exhibited. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.