Madison, Dane County and surrounding towns; being a history and guide to places of scenic beauty and historical note .. . Mississippi valley. The times inwhich they flourished cannot be safely computed, butDr. Dowler found a skeleton at New Orleans, forwhich he claims an antiquity of fifty thousand years;and Agassiz gives an estimate of ten thousand years,at the least, as the age of human remains in wondrous transmutations witnessed by this con-tinent cannot be better illustrated than by the factthat the fossils of our rocks alone, reveal the form ofthe ancestors of the horse and a
Madison, Dane County and surrounding towns; being a history and guide to places of scenic beauty and historical note .. . Mississippi valley. The times inwhich they flourished cannot be safely computed, butDr. Dowler found a skeleton at New Orleans, forwhich he claims an antiquity of fifty thousand years;and Agassiz gives an estimate of ten thousand years,at the least, as the age of human remains in wondrous transmutations witnessed by this con-tinent cannot be better illustrated than by the factthat the fossils of our rocks alone, reveal the form ofthe ancestors of the horse and ass; although therewere no horses on this continent when the Spaniardslanded in South America, save those which werebrought by the invading soldiery. Enough as to our predecessors, although enoughhas never yet been said. We turn to other featuresof interest. Eleven miles a little to the south of HISTORY OF MADISON. 199 west of Madison, in the ridge dividing the valley ofSugar river from the lake country, is a wonderfulcave, which unlike the cave of the Great Spirit,liscovered by Captain Carver, has not been destroyed. §IPMLGKR&L URNS. by railroads. The basin of a lake covering an areaof four thousand acres, discharged its volume agessince into the bluff by which it was bounded, and hasworn the channel into a series of chambers and pas-sages, which have been penetrated two thousand feet 200 HISTORY OF MADISON. by explorers, who do not know the extent of the cav-ern. There is no lake to fill the basin, nor has itbeen ascertained where the waters found egressbelow. The Four Lakes are five hundred feet be-neath the level of the basin, and Sugar river flows ata distance of about a mile and a half; but nothingindicates that the riparian current is augmented fromthe old lake level. Explorers, with proper appli-ances, will find within the cavern a field for romanticadventure and curious observation. The grotto opensin the upper magnesian limestone, beneath which astratum of sandstone h
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1870, bookidmadisondanec, bookyear1877
