iW A HISTORY OF 



Chart those where the industry of man has been more prevalent. 

 Wherever man comes, nature puts on a milder appearance : the ter- 

 rible and the sublime, are exchanged for the gentle and the useful ; 

 the cataract is sloped away into a placid stream ; and the banks be- 

 come more smooth and even.* It must have required ages to render 

 the Rhone or the Loire navigable : their beds must have been clean- 

 ed 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 in- 

 stances of rivers thus being made to flow more evenly, and more bene- 

 ficially 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 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 cata- 

 racts. 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,t in Sweden, the river rushes down from a pro- 

 digious 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 wa- 

 ter, that they disappear for a quarter of an hour, or more : the pit, in- 

 to which they are thus plunged, has been often sounded with a line of 

 some hundred fathoms long, but no ground has been found hitherto. 

 There is also a cataract 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 cataract in any part 

 of the world. There is a cataract at Albany, in the province of New- 

 York, which pours its stream fifty feet perpendicular. But of all the 

 cataracts in the world, that of Niagara, in Canada, if we consider 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 al- 

 ready said that the St. Lawrence was one of the largest rivers in tht 

 world ; and yet the whole of its waters are here poured down, by a 

 fall of a hundred and fifty feet perpendicular. 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 al- 

 most all North America into the Atlantic ocean, is here poured pre- 

 cipitately down a ledge of rocks, that rise, like a wall, across the whole 

 oed of its stream. The width of the river a little above, is near three 

 fjuarters of a mile broad ; and the rocks, where it grows narrower, 



* Buffon, voL ti. p. 90. t Phil- Trans, vol. ii. p. 3?S. 



