192 HISTORY OF 



with the desires of her controller. Every one's 

 experience must have supplied instances of rivers 

 thus being made to flow more evenly, and more 

 beneficially to mankind; but there are some 

 whose currents are so rapid, and falls so precipi- 

 tate, that no art can obviate, and that must for 

 ever remain as amazing instances of incorrigible 

 nature. 



Of this kind are the cataracts of the Rhine, 

 one of which I have seen exhibit a very strange 

 appearance ; it was that at Schaffhausen, which 

 was frozen quite across, and the water stood in 

 columns where the, cataract had formerly fallen. 

 The Nile, as was said, has its cataracts. The 

 river Vologda, in Russia, has two. The river 

 Zara, in Africa, has one near its source. The 

 river Velino, in Italy, has a cataract of above a 

 hundred and fifty feet perpendicular. Near the 

 city of Gottenburg,* in Sweden, the river rushes 

 down from a prodigious high precipice into a 

 deep pit, with a terrible noise, and such dreadful 

 force, that those trees designed for the masts of 

 ships, which are floated down the river, usually 

 are turned upside down in their fall, and often are 

 shattered to pieces, by being dashed against the 

 surface of the water in the pit : this occurs if the 

 masts fall sideways upon the water ; but if they 

 fall endways, they dive so far under water that 

 they disappear for a quarter of an hour, or more : 

 the pit into which they are thus plunged has been 

 often sounded with a line of some hundred fathoms 



Phil. Trans, vol. ii. p. 325. 



