I

I believe that those who have visited the falls the oftenest, admire and wonder at them the most. spent a great part of the following day upon the bank, traversing it backwards and forwards, alone; eager to exhaust every possible variety of prospect, and when I turned to take the last look, I felt a degree of regret which I believe was never excited in my breast by any analogous cause.

For the disappointment which is usually felt in gaining the first look of the falls, it is not difficult to account. We are accustomed to expect that the peculiar beauties of the mountain and the flood' should never be disconnected in the landscape, and are not prepared to find the falls of Niagara in the midst of a tract of country level to perfect deadness; a country where for miles around not a solitary hillock varies the surface, and nothing meets the eye but interminable forests of pine. The positions from which you must view the falls, and their vast semicircular width, detract most surprisingly from their apparent altitude. Add to all this, the unbridled scope in which imagination delights to riot, magnifying what is small and exaggerating what is great, and surely it will no longer be surprising that many, who take but a flying view` of the wonders of Niagara, should depart utterly displeased that they are not still more wonderful.

The measurement of the falls has been vari ously stated, but the discrepancy in the more recent accounts is not very considerable.

The

MEASUREMENT OF THE FALLS.

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Horse Shoe or British fall may be stated at about 150 feet in height; its width can only be approximated, but following the curve it is generally es timated at about 2000 feet; the chord of the arc, from the end of Goat Island to the Table Rock, cannot much exceed a half of that extent. The Horse Shoe fall, however, has but a remote resemblance to that which gives it its name; it forms a small and irregular segment of a circle, with a very deep angular gash near the centre. In this gap the water glides over the edge of the rock with most crystalline smoothness, while at either extremity it breaks into snow-white foam at the very edge. The American fall is about 1100 feet in extreme width, including the comparatively small jet at the inner extremity. Its height is 165 feet; but though thus in reality exceeding by 15 feet the height of the British fall, it appears to the eye of an observer on this side considerably lower; partly from the effect of the perspective, but more particularly from an accumulation of rocks at the bottom, upon which the water breaks. The brow of Goat Island which divides the falls, is about 980 feet in breadth. The whole extent therefore of the concave, from the farther extremity of the American fall to the Table Rock, following the line of the cataracts, is according to this calculation very nearly 4000 feet, or about four times the breadth of the river half a mile below. You will more readily perhaps conceive of the features of

the falls by referring to the rude sketch which accompanies this description.

Most of the accounts of the falls which are contained in geographical works, mention that the sound of them is heard at a very great distance. This is comparatively seldom the case. I have been told in the neighbourhood that in particular states of the barometer, and especially before stormy weather, the sound of the cataracts is heard twenty miles off, or even farther; but on both occasions I could with difficulty distinguish it at a distance of two miles, and sometimes, I understand, it does not reach so far.

The falls of Niagara are among those phenomena in the external world, from which speculatists have spun a cobweb theory of the earth, proving or intended to prove

"That he who made it, and revealed its date

To Moses, was mistaken in its age.'

There is every reason to believe from the aspect of the banks, and the character of the surrounding country above and below the falls, that the river has at some former period scooped out the channel, through the solid limestone, from Queenston, about seven miles below, to the position of the present cataracts. Below Queenston, the ground on both sides of the river is very nearly of the same level with the banks of lake Ontario, but at that town it rises with a sudden and steep slope

THEORIES OF GEOLOGISTS.

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crossing the river at right angles to its channel, and continuing gradually to increase in elevation, till it attains to the height of lake Erie. At Queenston the inner surface of the banks first becomes precipitous and broken; and mineralogists of whose accuracy and fidelity there can be no doubt, have ascertained, by minute inspection, that the strata on the opposite sides of the river correspond exactly with each other, and scarcely vary to the situation of the present falls. From these premises it has been concluded, that the waters of the Niagara formerly ran down the face of the heights of Queenston,-that the rocky material at last gave way under the continued attrition, and that the cataract gradually worked its way backward, till it separated into two at the present position. Not only so, but that this process has continued with the most unvarying regularity, accomplishing very nearly the same number of inches in the same space of time. This backward motion however, if any such there be, is at present amazingly slow, and it is therefore decided, with unhesitating certainty and coolness, that the world must have existed, and the waters of the

9. Limestone above, and sandstone below, with forty feet interposing of exceedingly friable slate. North Am. Rev. No. XXXVI. p. 230. In this article the reviewer combats the idea of the gradual retrocession of the falls, but does not allude to the objections which had thence been started to the truth of the Mosaic account of creation.

Niagara have been at work, for a much larger period than six thousand years.

With the same facility of hypothesis and assertion, they have decided upon its future as easily as upon its past operations. It is inevitably certain, we are assured, that it will gradually saw its way twenty miles farther and drain lake Erie, and going backward three hundred miles, take up its temporary residence below Detroit. It is needless for us at present to pursue it any farther.

But if we grant, that there was a time when the water from lake Erie first made a breach in Queenston heights, these theorists cannot refuse, that there must have been a previous time when no breach as yet existed. If so, where then was the outlet of lake Erie? By what channel did chain of western lakes,

the waters of the great above Ontario, find a passage to the ocean? If these lakes did not then exist, and if they and their outlet were the simultaneous result of some mighty terraqueous convulsion, may it not be as reasonably concluded that the whole channel of the Niagara, from the present falls to Queenston, was ploughed out by the same revolutionizing struggle? -and that in place of being the operation of thousands of years, it may have been the work of a month or perhaps of a day? Upon this supposition it is not difficult to account for the present position of the falls; below them the channel is comparatively narrow and confined, and the current must