THE EARTH. ii»i> 



Sv^eden, the river rushes do%vn from a prodigious high precipice, 

 into a deep pit, with a terrible noise, and such dreadful iorce. 

 that those trees designed for the masts of ships, which are float- 

 ed down the river, are usually turned upside down in their lail, 

 and often are shattered to pieces, by being dashed against the 

 surface of the water in the pit •, this occurs if the masts fall side- 

 ways upon the water ; but if they fall endways, they dive so fai 

 under water, that they disai)pear for a quarter of an hour, or 

 more ; the pit, into 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 

 Powers-court, 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 tha 

 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 liawrence, 

 in its passage from the lake Erie into the lake Ontario. We 

 have already said that the St Lawrence was one of the largest 

 rivers in the woi'ld ; 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 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 abo-'e, is near three 

 quarters of a mile bro;id ; and the rocks, where it grows nar- 

 rower, are four huiidied 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 na- 

 ture. Just in the middle of this circular wall of waters, a little 

 island, that has braved the fury of the current, presents one ot 

 its points, and divides the stream at top into two ; but it unites 

 again long before it has got to the bottom. The noise of the 

 la'l is heard at several leagues distance ; and the fury of the 



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