292 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Governor General of Canada, and Mr. A. H. Green, of New York, who 

 subsequently prevented the intrusion of all power structures in the 

 state reservation on the New York side, a policy unfortunately not fol- 

 lowed by the government on the Canadian side. Here even the park 

 was widened, at the cost of the falls, in curtailing their crest-line by 

 several hundred feet. Yet among those interested in the power com- 

 panies it was commonly said that they were improving the park ; a few, 

 who were powerless, seeing through this sophistry. That public opinion 

 was swayed by such representations is not to be wondered at, for at a 

 later date, April 26, 1906, the Canadian section of the commission states 

 that, " It would be a sacrilege to destroy the scenic effect of Niagara 

 Falls, unless and until the public needs are so imperative as to compel 

 and justify the sacrifice" (p. 102), and yet they suggest no cur- 

 tailment on the Canadian side. The report further says that, " It 

 is possible to preserve the beauty, and yet permit the development 

 on the Canadian side of the Niagara River " — of a certain amount of 

 power on which I shall comment later, but no data are given on which 

 the above statement is based. Indeed, I was unable to form any 

 opinion whatsoever until my own investigations were made, which were 

 begun before the proceedings of the International Commission, and 

 not completed until some time after the premature report, cited above, 

 appeared in print. 



7. Results, the Outcome of Purely Scientific Investigations. — The 

 conclusions reached concerning the spoliation of the Falls of Niagara 

 are the outcome of investigations into purely scientific problems, and 

 a brief account of them may show more convincingly how these results 

 have been obtained. Just twenty years ago, I had the honor of an- 

 nouncing to this association the discovery that Lake Huron, with Mich- 

 igan and Superior as tributaries, formerly emptied to the northeast, 

 and did not discharge into a shrunken Lake Erie; and, consequently, 

 Niagara was then a very small river. Six years later, I again laid 

 before this association additional observations indicating that the falls 

 had receded nearly three miles, when the Huron drainage was turned 

 into Lake Erie; and with the fragmentary data bearing on the dis- 

 charges of the rivers, an attempt was made, with only partial success, 

 to determine the size of the original Niagara Eiver. 



One of the chief problems of my latest investigations was to deter- 

 mine the volume of the Niagara Eiver in its early stages. It was not 

 a simple matter, for contradictions appeared in the data obtained, which 

 had to be eliminated. This involved the whole question of the physics 

 of the rivers, requiring months of labor to collect the data and analyze 

 them. In this connection, I found that the outlets of both Lake Erie 

 and Lake Ontario had been recently lowered, while Mr. Thomas Russel, 

 of the IT. S. Lake Survey, had previously made the great discovery that 



