CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE I3 



the sea, provoke in us no commensurate idea of the stupendous 

 force vvliich water is capable of exertin_o^. 



Two hundred and odd years a<j:o the earhcst printed descrip- 

 tion of Niagara was given to the world by Father Hennepin. 

 His account of this "vast and pi-odigious cadence of water" is 

 a mixture of childish exaggeration and sober truth." But the 

 sublimity ot this great cataract, which discharges the enormous 

 volume of eighteen million cubic feet of water every second, 

 needs not the aid ot description. About 9,800 cubic miles of 

 fresh water — nearly half the quantity on the entire globe — are 

 in the upper lakes, and all the water from these huge reservoirs 

 makes the circuit of the falls, the St. Lawrence, the ocean, 

 vapor, rain, and a retuin to the kikes in a little more than a 

 century and a half. 



But how shrinks this brief cycle of time and how fade the out- 

 lines of the scene wdien in imagination we stand beside the 

 gigantic operations of the past. What some of those operations 

 were let Mr. Cla''ence King tell in his own words. In alluding 

 to volcanic activities he speaks of "what was once a world-wide 

 and immense exhibition of telluric energy * * * distortions 

 of the crust, deludes of molten stone, emissions of mineral dust, 

 heated waters and noxious gases," and asserts that modern vol- 

 canic phenomena are "insignificant when com|)ared with the 

 guhs of molten matter which were thrown U[:) in the great mas- 

 sive eruptions " of the past. 



He adds : " Of climatic catastrojjhes we have the record of 

 at least one ;" and in reference to a glacial period he sets forth 

 the destructive effects of the invasion of our latitude bv polar 

 ice, and the devastating power of the floods which were charac- 

 teristic of its recession. He contends that the modern rivers 

 are mere echoes of their parent streams in the early quai ternary 

 age and utterly incaj^able, even with infinite time, to perform 

 the work of glacial torrents. Citing the wonderful canons of 

 the Cordilleras, he sa)S "they could never have been carved by 

 the pigmy rivers of this climate to the end of time." In view 



