THE MAELSTROM. 57 



DundaffLinn, the appearance of which is also very beautiful, though it 

 is only about three and a half feet high. About three miles farther 

 down, and a considerable way past the town of Lanark, is the last of the 

 falls, called Stonebyres Linn. It is a precipice, or rather a succession of 

 three precipices, making together a height of 64 feet. The same general 

 features of rugged rocks, here appearing in all their dreary barrenness, 

 there concealed by trees and shrubs, of wild birds winging their flight 

 over the bounding cataract, and mingling their screams with its roar, 

 and of cultivated nature in its most luxuriant beauty, contending all 

 around -with the sublimity of the ceaseless torrent, belong, in degree, as 

 much to Stonebyres as to Corra Linn. There is a peculiar phenomenon 

 to be seen here, that of the incessant endeavours of the salmon in 

 spawning season, to mount the lofty barrier by which they find their 

 migration from the sea opposed. It is needless to say, that their efforts 

 are unavailing, the trout, however, have been noticed to spring up 

 DundaffLinn apparently without much difficulty. 



THE MAELSTROM. 



WHIRLPOOLS are occasioned by currents meeting with sub-marine 

 obstacles, which throw them into gyration. When the movement is 

 rapid, the centre is the most depressed portion of the rotating circle, and 

 objects drawn within it are submerged at that point. The Maelstrom 

 on the coast of Norway is a whirlpool of this kind, the perils of which 

 are probably much exaggerated. The flood tide setting from the south 

 west, amongst the Loffoden isles, especially when it meets with a strong 

 gale from the northwest, produces a great agitation of the waves, and a 

 whirpool is formed, the roaring of which is heard at the distance of many 

 miles. Its agitated vortices are dangerous to vessels, and it is said 

 that seals and whales, when caught with its eddies are unable to extricate 

 themselves from destruction. It is now well ascertained that Charybdes, 

 in the Strait of Messina, owes its terrors to the imagination of seamen in 

 the infancy of navigation, and all its celebrity to poetic fancy. Such is 

 the dry detail, which an eminent philosopher gives of this long famed 

 whirlpool, stripping it by a few matter of facts of most of its highly poetic 

 trappings; yet, plain and unvarnished as the truth may be, we cannot 

 deny ourselves the pleasure of quoting a truly graphic description, from 

 Fruser's Magazine, for September 1834, of the supposed situation of a 



