Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 December 1876 — Remarkable Salt Mines. [ARTICLE]

Remarkable Salt Mines.

About ten miles southeast of Cracow, the former capital of Poland, are situated the famous salt mines of W’ieliczka, in Galicia. The area of this wonderful mineral deposit, as at present defined, measures two and one-half miles in length by a little more than one-half in breadth, and its solid depth Is about 690 feet. It is intercalated in strata of the tertiary formation, consisting of compact, fossiliferous clays, and rests at the base on a foundation of sandstone. The principal minerals associated with it are gypsum, bitumen, anhydrite and the sulphates of baryta, strontia and sulphur. The mines are entered by eleven separate shafts, which open, at five different levels, into galleries that branch into a perfect labyrinth of passages and chambers. It is said that the galleries which have already been excavated have an aggregate length of considerably more than 400 miles. The salt lies about 200 feet below the surface, and thence extends down to a depth of about 1,020 feet. The direction of the bed is east and west, following the trend of the Carpathian Mountains, and appearing-in small deposits at intervals until it enters Transylvania, where extensive mines exist.

The annual product of the Wieliczka mines is 1,500,000 cwt.; and at thisrate it is calculated that the yield will not be exhausted for at least 300 years. It is not known when the deposit was discovered, but it was being quarried by Poland at the beginning of the twelfth "century, and had become a source of great profit under Casimir the Great in the fourteenth century. In 1858 the yearly net income of the mine was $1,6u0,000. According to the treaty executed on the partition of Poland, Austria is compelled to furnish to Russia 800.000 cwt. of the annual product of salt, and 300,000 to Prussia, leaving 410.000 cwt. to herself. Some of the old chambers in the mine are 150 feet in height, but the more recent ones are much smaller. The most ancient of the halls is called the Chapel of St. Anthony, and is adorned with columns, statues of the saints, an altar, a crucifix, etc. —all cut out of solid salt. This is in the upper story of the mine, which is penetrated by humid air from without coming down the shafts; and the salt figures in the chapel are consequently undergoing a slow process of dissolution. Another large chamber, designated as Francis Joseph’s Hall, is fitted up as a ball-room, with large chandeliers, and statues of Vulcan and Neptune, wrought out of the universal mineral. On the occasion of the visit of any of the Royal family to the mines, and also at the occurrence of festivals, the chambers and passages are brilliantly illuminated, fireworks and guns are shot off, and the scene is altogether like a chapter from a fairy tale, or like a passage from the account of the Plutonian regions in the mythologies of the ancients.

In one part of the mine there is a lake, 650 feet long and forty feet deep, which* is formed by the accumulation of the water trickling through the strata. Visitors are paddled across in a boat—thereby enjoying an excursion, it may be presumed, quite similar in its gloomy and weird sensations to that which travelers experience in the trip over the rock bound lake in Mammoth Cave. Bayard Taylor says of the Wieliczka mine: “Itis a bewildering maze of galleries, grand halls, staircases and vaulted chambers, where one loses all sense of distance or direction, and drifts along blindly in the wake of his conductor. Everything was solid salt, except where great piers of hewn logs had been built up to support some threatening roof ; or vast chasms, left in quarrying, bad been bridged across. As we descended to lower regions, the air became more dry and agreeable, and the saline walls more pure and brilliant. One hall, 108 feet in height, resembled a Grecian theater —the traces of blocks taken out in regular layers representing the seats for the spectators. Out of this single hall 1,000,000 cwt. of salt had been taken, or enough to supply the 40,000,000 inhabitants of Austria for one year. Of the method of mining the salt, Mr. Taylor writes: ‘*The process is quite primitive—scarcely differing from that of the ancient Egyptians in quarrying granite. The blocks are first marked out on the surface by a series of grooves. One side is then deepened to the required thickness, and, wedges being inserted under the block, it is soon split off. It is then split transversely into pieces of one cwt. each, in which form it is ready for sale. Those intended for Russia are rounded on the edges and corners until they acquire the shape of large cocoons, for the convenience of transportation into the interior of the countiy. The number of workmen employed in the mines is 1,500, all of whom belong to the * upper crust ’ —that is, they live on the outside of the world. They are divided into gangs, and relieve each other every six hours.” The minei's are, as a rule, as healthy as the men who labor above ground, ana no particular form of disease is generated by their existence in an atmosphere of salt. One might fancy that at least their fleshly tissues would be preserved against all possible decay by their thorough saturation with salt.' It is noted that the wood used in ths mines never changes, except as it is worn by abrasion. 8o should the miners last, suffering merely * gradual transformation into pickled mummies.—CAt cago Tribune. _

—lt is said that two newspaper men—of the New York Sun and the Philadelphia Timet— formed a conspiracy to bum the Baron de Palm’s body in Dr. Le Moyne s furnace at one o’clock in the morning, before the other spectators could J* warned They offered the fireman at first SIOO. and afterward a gold watch and a diamond ring in addition, to start up the furnace, but he was incorruptible, and the plot fell through. The object of the conspirators was, of course, to obtain an exclusive report of the process of cremation.