12 LAKE SUPERIOR. 



and the untidy look of the cabins, one conjectures the settlers are 

 mostly the former laborers on the railroad, or at least countrymen 

 of theirs. 



June 17th. — At 8 A. M. we arrived in Buffalo, after about thirty- 

 six hours' actual travelling from Boston, a distance of 527 miles. 

 We had previously ascertained that it would be advisable to wait 

 until the 19th before embarking for Mackinaw, in order to give time 

 for procuring stores, tents, &c., and had determined to spend the 

 intervening time at Niagara. On our arrival we found that the 

 morning train for Niagara was to start at 9 ; so leaving some 

 of the party to make arrangements, the rest of us took the cars and 

 arrived at the Falls about 11 o'clock. 



The road thither presents a continuation of the same noble forest 

 of " first growth," but often broken by clearings. Our European 

 friends were much struck by the contrast with the region we had 

 left only yesterday. A large proportion of the trees were elms, not 

 the plume-like spreading elms of our avenues, but a straight, un- 

 broken, scarcely tapering trunk of sixty feet height, then abruptly 

 expanding with sturdy limbs at right angles into a round head. 



In the afternoon we crossed to the Canada side. The museum 

 here contains an interesting collection of the birds and fishes of 

 the neighborhood. A camera-obscura, the field of which is some 

 twenty feet in diameter, placed on the edge of the cliff, gives exten- 

 sive views of the Falls. I was struck with the disproportionally 

 high tone of the sky in the landscapes it presented. The effect was 

 something like the glow that comes on after sunset. 



In the evening we assembled in a hall leading to our lodgings at 

 the Cataract Hotel, (in that part of the building which overlooks the 

 Rapids,) and Prof. Agassiz, having displayed his portable black- 

 board, (consisting of a piece of painted linen on a roller,) gave 

 us the following sketch of the region passed over since his last lec- 

 ture : — 



" East of Lake Ontario we have granitic formations, which were doubtless 

 islands in the ancient time, on whose shores the later formations accumulated, 

 by deposition from the water, in successive beds, the later covering the more 

 ancient, except where these had in the meanwhile been elevated from the 

 primeval ocean along the shores of the high land already dry. Thus the 



