fastened at the end of it for a seat. The gouffre of Vigne Close, in Ardèche, which is about six hundred feet deep, has five successive pits, and its complete exploration required three days. The bottom of the pit may be a simple cleft in the rock, or an immense cathedrallike chamber; as at Rabanel, near Ganges, and Hérault, the deepest abyss in France, the vault of which expands into a gigantic nave, five hundred feet high, which is lighted by the beam of light that falls through the opening, presenting a grand and indescribable spectacle. Some pits of less depth, as the Tin doul de la Vayssière, in Aveyron, and the Padirac well, in Lot, both leading to underground rivers, enjoy a still more complete illumination. Considerable talus banks close the ends of these broad pits, and are generally produced by the caving in of the roofs of caves.
Lively controversies and gross errors have prevailed concerning the geological formation of abysses. The abyss of Jean Nouveau, Vaucluse, among others, furnishes evidence against the false hypothesis that such pits are as a rule the results of cave-ins, whereas pits of that origin are rare and exceptional. These pits are for the most part fissures, the principal feature of which is their narrowness. At Jean Nouveau the greatest breadth is not more than about sixteen feet. It is the deepest vertical pit of a single shaft without intermediate terraces that we know of, and is about five hundred and thirty feet from the surface of the ground to its floor. The mass of stone rubbish at the bottom prevented our descending into a second pit.
Pits composed, like Vigne Close, of several successive wells, destroy another hypothesis—that of the formation of gouffres by the emissions from thermal springs.
The greatest danger in descending these pits arises from the showers of stones that sometimes come down upon the head of the explorer. These are often started by his friends the hunters, or by their dogs gamboling around at will.
While some of the caverns I have explored were stopped up by obstacles of one kind or another that prevented further progress, in others we found considerable rivers running a nearly free course. We rarely found pits formed by the collapse of the roofs of the cave in cases where the distance from the subterranean river which by its work of erosion provoked the catastrophe to the surface was more than one hundred metres. The pit of the Mas Raynal, Aveyron, is one hundred and six metres deep, and abuts upon a large subterranean river, which supplies the Sorgues of Saint-AfTrique, one of the finest springs of France. When we explored it, in 1889, we could not pass the low chambers which occur in it because the water was too high, and we have not visited it since. Its
