Page:A tour through the northern counties of England, and the borders of Scotland - Volume I.djvu/113

 to the north of the castle. Here a prodigious scene of subterraneous excavation discovers itself, consisting of several lime-stone mines and tunnels worked into the rock, one of which perforates it entirely, and opens again into day at the distance of nearly two miles from its entrance. This is thirteen feet high and nine wide, and at one point sixty-four feet below the surface of the earth. The caverns are truly august, being of great extent, and considerable height; their roof supported by vast rude square pillars of lime-stone, left for that purpose. Various marine productions are found in this mass of rock, such as enchrini, cornua ammonis, anomiæ, and other common fossils; but the rarest production of this sort is the pediculus marinus, or sea-louse, the entimolithus paradoxus monoculi deperditi of Linnæus, but called, in the homely naturalist's vocabulary of the place where it is found, the Dudley locust. In form it resembles the common wood-louse, except that it is trilobated, and exceeds it considerably in size, some specimens being nearly five inches long, and few so small as the recent insect generally is. Being discovered only at Dudley and another place in the kingdom, the fossil is the more valuable; a circumstance not unknown to the venders of these productions of the