LITMIR.BIZ

      Fig. 1.8 The old route across the underground river Pivka in the Great Hall of Postojna Jama in Slovenia from an aquatint engraved by G. Dobler after a painting by Alois Schaffenrath, published in 1830. (Courtesy of Trevor Shaw)

      In the USA important work continued intermittently from 1840. In that year Davidson collected the first specimens of a blind white fish in Mammoth Cave, described by de Kay, Wyman and Tellkampf as Amblyopsis spelaea. Tellkampf went on to describe other fauna from Mammoth Cave and was followed by E.D. Cope and A.S. Packard, whose remarkable studies through the 1870s put America for a time at the forefront of biospeleological research. Meanwhile, in the 1840s, V. Motschoulsky reported the first cave-specialized insects captured in the caves of Caucasia, and in 1857 De la Rouzee discovered the first cavernicolous insects known from France.

      Scientific investigation of our cave faunas began in a round-about way in about 1852, when Professor Westwood and S. Bate included the following reference in their History of the British Sessile-eyed Crustacea, Vol.1, published in 1863.

      “In the year 1852”, writes Bate, “Professor Westwood was so fortunate as to obtain from a pump-well near Maidenhead, a quantity of [Niphargus sp.] … since when they have been found in Hampshire, Wiltshire … and very recently in Dublin.”

      Shortly afterwards, news of the discovery in Europe and America of strange blind cave animals prompted Naturalists E. Percival Wright and A.H. Haliday to search for similar creatures in Mitchelstown New Cave in Co. Tipperary. Their search was successful and they described their find – a tiny Collembolan doubtfully identified as Lipura stillicidii Schiodte – in a paper read before a British Association Meeting in Dublin in 1857.

      More than thirty years were to elapse before the next glimmer of enthusiasm for Irish cave life manifested itself in the form of a joint excursion in 1894 by the Dublin, Cork and Limerick Field Clubs to the Cave of Mitchelstown. One of the participants, George H. Carpenter, recorded that “after an informal luncheon on the roadside, the party being provided with candles, descended the sloping passage and ladder which led to the depths below.” They spent two hours searching for cave animals and, although they failed to reach the underground river, made a reasonable collection of fauna, including the rare blind cave spider now known as Porrhomma rosenhaueri. In the same year, pioneering English arachnologist F.O.P. Cambridge collected spiders in Wookey Hole, but without finding anything of particular interest.

      Early in 1895 E.A. Martel and his wife paid a well-publicised visit to Ireland. The event prompted the Fauna and Flora Committee of the Royal Irish Academy to support H.L. Jameson with a grant “to further investigate cave fauna in Ireland”. He joined the Martels in the Enniskillen area of Co. Fermanagh and, while the Frenchman surveyed the caves and drew up his plans, Jameson collected cave animals. The interest seems to have persisted, for Jameson is also known to have made faunal collections in Speedwell Mine in Derbyshire in 1901, but there then followed a gap of over thirty years during which British cave fauna was again neglected.