Hovey's Handbook of the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky

Hovey, Horace Carver, 1833-1914Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
85K words
Chapters
9

Tags

English Originals Historical GeographyTravel Nature ObservationIllustrated GuideGeography ScienceTravel GuideKentuckyKarst Landscape

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Hovey's Handbook of the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky by Horace Carver HoveyAuthor: Hovey, Horace Carver, 1833-1914,Language: English, Class: F396: United States local history: Old Southwest. Lower Mississippi Valley, Release Date: Jun 3, 2015

Editor's review

This Hovey's Handbook of the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky is a representative work of early cave-exploration writing. The author, Horace Carter Hovey, organizes the content in handbook form, offering descriptions of the Mammoth Cave's geological structure, passage routes, and chamber features while also incorporating the observations and impressions common to nineteenth-century travelers, in prose that bears a distinct mark of its era. For today's readers its value lies more in the documentary and cultural sphere: on the one hand it shows how early natural history and cave investigation were recorded and presented, and on the other it serves as corroborating evidence for understanding the evolution of American regional travel writing and perceptions of natural heritage. This Project Gutenberg electronic edition is easy to search and carry for reading, and is suitable for readers interested in natural history, early travel literature, or cave geology as extended browsing material, though it should be noted that its framework of knowledge and mode of expression are outdated and it should not be treated as a current geological guide.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read the table of contents and preface first to grasp the handbook's structure, then select chamber and passage chapters according to interest.
  2. Keep a modern geological reference on the Mammoth Cave at hand for comparison, distinguishing old claims from current findings.
  3. Read the observations and descriptions as period texts, noting how the author organizes natural scenery.
  4. For the English original, use an electronic dictionary; when encountering old place names and terms, verify them first rather than skipping them.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9

FAQ

Can this book be used as a modern guidebook to the Mammoth Cave? Not recommended. It was written in the nineteenth century, and its passage descriptions, geological explanations, and tourism information are all outdated, and may not match today's cave conditions and safety regulations. It is better read as a document and as travel writing; for actual visits, rely on current official guides.
Can I read this book if my English is not good? This is an English-language original handbook with rather old-fashioned syntax and many technical terms. If English reading is difficult, start with the table of contents and preface using a dictionary, or select descriptive passages for close reading; treating it as reference material rather than reading it straight through will make it much less burdensome.
What is the main reading value of this book? Its value lies mainly in the documentary and cultural sphere: it shows how early natural-history investigation and travel handbooks recorded caves, and it reflects how nineteenth-century American readers perceived natural wonders. It is especially useful for readers studying natural-history writing and regional travel literature.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Hovey, Horace Carver, 1833-1914 Author · American · 1833–1914

Hovey, Horace Carver (1833–1914), was an American writer and cave researcher. Public information about his life is limited, and the surviving records chiefly concern his exploration and writing about American caves. His representative work is Hovey's Handbook of the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, which takes the famous Mammoth Cave as its subject and combines firsthand observation with the character of a guidebook, introducing readers to the cave's location, structure, and scenery. The library also holds information related to his book on famous American caves, suggesting that his writing focused largely on the distribution and features of American caves. Overall, his works are addressed to general readers, written in plain language and attentive to field observation and practical information, making them useful sources for understanding late nineteenth-century American cave exploration and cave tourism.