"4 
¢ 
6, 
of 1 Teton. 7 
: 3 bs ee 2 
D. J. Macgowan on the Eagre 
c y Em ; 
The 
as it were, to the summit with perfect safety. Os 
was of greatest interest when the Eagre had passed about one- 
half way among the craft. On one side they were quietly “repo- 
sing on the surface of the unruffled streain, while those 
nether portion were pitching and heaving in tumultuous confu- 
sion on the flood, others were scaling with the agility of salmon, 
the formidable cascade. This grand and exciting scene was but 
of a mioment’s duration,—it passed up the river in an insfant, but 
from this point with gradually diminishing force, size, and velo- . 
city, until it ceased to be perceptible; which Chinese acconnts 
represent to be eighty miles distant from the city! From ebb‘to | 
flood tide, the change was almost instantaneous; a slight flood* 
continued after the passage of the wave, but it soon began to 
ebb. Having lost my memoranda, [ am obliged to write from re- 
collection: my impression is, that the fall was about twenty feet; 
the Chinese say that the rise and fall is sometimes forty feet at 
Hang-chau. The maximum rise and fall at spring tides is proba- 
bly at the mouth of the river, or upper part of the bay, where the 
Eagre is hardly discoverable: in the Bay of Fundy, where the 
tides rush in with amazing velocity, there is at one place a rise of 
seventy feet; but there the magnificent phenomenon in queshon 
does not appear to be known at all. It is not, therefore, where 
tides attain their greatest rapidity, or maximum rise and-fall, that 
this wave is met with, but where a river and its estuary both pre- 
sent a peculiar configuration. ae . 
Dryden’s definition of an Eagre, appended in a note. to the 
verse above quoted inthe Threnodia Augustalis, is, “a tide Swell- 
ing above another tide,” which he says he had himself observed 
in the river Trentag#-Such, according to Chinese oral accounts, 
is the character-of the ‘T'sien-tang tides,—a wave of considerable 
height rushes suddenly in from the bay, which is soon followed 
by one much larger. Other accounts represent three successive 
waves riding in; hence the name of the temple mentioned, that 
of the Three Waves. Both here and on the Hooghly, I observed 
but one wave; my attention, however, was not particularly di- 
rected to this feature of the Eagre. The term should perhaps be 
on 
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oO 
