THE EARTH. 



65 



The rivers of those countries that have 

 been least inhabited, are usually more rocky, 

 uneven, and broken into waterfalls or cata- 

 racts, than those where the industry of man 

 has "been more prevalent. Wherever man 

 comes, nature puts on a milder appearance : 

 the terrible and the sublime are exchanged 

 for the gentle and the useful ; the cataract is 

 sloped away into a placid stream; and the 

 banks become more smooth and even. a It 

 mast have required ages to render the Rhone 

 or the Loire navigable ; their beds must have 

 been cleaned and directed ; their inequalities 

 removed ; and, by a long course of industry, 

 nature must have been taught to conspire 

 with the desires of her controller. Every 

 one's experience must have supplied instances 

 of rivers thus being made to How more evenly, 

 and more beneficially to mankind ; but there 

 are some whose currents are so rapid, and 

 falls so precipitate, that no art can obviate , 

 and that must for ever remain as amazing in- 

 stances 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 Schaff- 

 hausen, which was frozen quite across, and 

 the water stood in columns where the cata- 

 ract 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 Gottenburgh, 1 ' 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, are usually 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 plung- 

 ed has been often sounded with a line of some 

 hundred fathoms long, but no ground has 

 been found hitherto. There is also a cata- 



* Bufibn vol. ii. p. 90. 



I ract at Powerscourt, in Ireland, in which, if I 

 am rightly informed, the water falls three 

 hundred feet perpendicular; which is a 

 greater descent than that of any other cata- 

 ract in any part of the world. There is a 

 cataract at Albany, in the province of New 

 York, which pours its stream fifty feet per- 

 pendicular But of all the cataracts in the 

 world, that of Niagara, in Canada, if we con- 

 sider the great body of water that falls, must 

 be allowed to be the greatest, and the most 

 astonishing 



This amazing fall of water is made by the 

 river St. Lawrence, in its passage from the 

 lake Erie into the lake Ontario. We have 

 already said that St. Lawrence was one of 

 the largest rivers in the world ; and yet the 

 whole of its waters are here poured down by 

 a fall of a hundred and fifty feet perpendicu- 

 lar. It is not easy to bring the imagination 

 to correspond with the greatness of the scene; 

 a river extremely deep and rapid, and that 

 serves to drain the waters of almost all North 

 America into the Atlantic ocean, is here 

 poured precipitately down a ledge of rocks, 

 that rise like a wall, across the whole bed of 

 its stream. The width of the river, a little 

 above, is near three quarters of a mile broad, 

 and the rocks, where it grows narrower, are 

 four hundred yards over. Their direction is 

 not straight across, but hollowing inwards 

 like a horse-shoe ; so that the cataract, which 

 bends to the shape of the obstacle, rounding 

 inwards, presents a kind of theatre the most 

 tremendous in nature. Just in the middle 

 of this circular wall of waters, a little island, 

 that has braved the fury of the current, pre- 

 sents one of its points, and divides the stream 

 at top into two ; but it unites again long be- 

 fore it has got to the bottom. The noise of 

 the fall is heard at several leagues distance : 

 and the fury of the waters at the bottom of 

 their fall is inconceivable. The dashing pro- 

 duces a mist that rises to the very clouds ; 

 and that produces a most beautiful rainbow, 

 when the sun shines. It may easily be con- 

 ceived, that such a cataract quite destroys 

 the navigation of the stream ; and yet some 

 Indian canoes, as it is said, have been known 

 to venture down it with safety. 



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



