57 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Lake Erie, as everybody knows, and as we have indicated in the ideal 

 section of the St. Lawrence and its lakes (Fig. 3), fills a shallow basin 

 eroded in a plateau 333 feet above the level of Lake Ontario, and 565 

 feet above the ocean. The surface of Lake Michigan is 600 feet above 

 tide-level, and, as the lake is 1,000 feet deep, its bottom is 400 feet be- 

 low the level of tide-water. Lake Superior is 900 feet deep, and its 

 surface about 20 feet above that of Lake Michigan. The Niagara, 

 from Buffalo to the head of the Rapids, has a fall of 15 feet. The fall 

 from Lake Michigan to Goat Island is 50 feet just equal to the slope 

 of the Rapids. A barrier 15 feet high, stretching across the plateau 

 at the head of the Rapids, would throw the river back on Lake Erie, 

 and such a barrier, 50 feet high, would hold back the waters of Lake 

 Michigan. 



We can see the significance, now, of a few features of topography 

 about the Falls. 



The reader will turn to the map of Niagara River, which we have 

 drawn, with some modifications, from the official maps of the Boundary 

 Commission. He will see that, from the foot of Grand Island to the 

 Falls, the course of the river is almost due west. At the Falls it makes 

 an elbow, and extends thence, with no abrupt winding except at the 

 Whirlpool, northward to Lake Ontario. At Schlosser Landing, about 

 a mile above the Rapids, a stream called Gill Creek empties into the 

 river. It is not more than six miles long, and its course is parallel to 

 that of Niagara below the Falls. Its source is a swamp about two 

 miles east of the river, and nearly the same distance north of Old Fort 

 Gray. We have the anomaly of two streams flowing side by side, 

 within two miles of each other, in opposite directions, and through an 

 apparently level country. Gill Creek, flowing southward, has a fall in 

 six miles, of 60 feet. Its source is 60 feet higher than the surface 

 of Niagara at Schlosser Landing. This high land is not a hill, but a 

 ridire an anticlinal axis extending from northeast to southwest across 

 the Niagara channels. Before it was broken through and eroded, it 

 formed a barrier a few feet higher than the surface of Lake Michigan. 

 Then Niagara was not, and the upper lakes sought the ocean through 

 a great river, sections of whose channel, as we have seen, can still be 

 traced from Chicago to the Illinois. 



We have lingered long in the past. What of the future ? The 

 intelligent tourist who stands by the great cataract cannot allow the 

 beauty, the grandeur, the vast magnificence of the scene, to bear down 

 his imagination and bind up all his powers in the present. He looks 

 and listens, and, while he stands overpowered by the falling torrent 

 and rising spray, and thunderous pounding of torrent on fallen torrent, 

 his imagination breaks the spell, and his thoughts wander away into 

 the past and the yet to be. Are future ages to see this wonder, and 

 find it as great as our eyes see it ? 



Mr. Hall, in his report on the Fourth District, and Sir Charles 



