Ch. XV.] 



FALLS OF NIAGARA. 



3 5 9 



rounding country, comprising Upper Canada on the west, and 



New- 



its banks, and nowhere more than thirty or forty feet above 

 them.* (See Plate III.) The river being occasionally inter- 

 spersed with low wooded islands, and having sometimes a 

 width of three miles, glides along at first with a clear, smooth, 

 and tranquil current, falling only fifteen feet in as many miles, 

 and in this part of its course resembling an arm of Lake 

 Erie. But its character is afterwards entirely changed, on 

 approaching the Eapids, where it begins to rush and foam 

 over a rocky and uneven limestone bottom, for the space of 

 nearly a mile, till at length it is thrown down perpendicularly 

 165 feet at the Falls. Here the river is divided into two 

 sheets of water by an island, the largest cataract being more 

 than a third of a mile broad, the smaller one having a breadth 

 of six hundred feet. When the water has precipitated itself 

 into a pool of vast depth, it rushes with great velocity down 

 the sloping bottom of a narrow chasm, for a distance of seven 

 miles. This ravine varies from 200 to 400 yards in width 

 from cliff to cliff; contrasting, therefore, strongly in its 

 breadth with that of the river above. Its depth is from 200 

 to 300 feet, and it intersects for about seven miles the table- 

 land before described, which terminates suddenly at Queens- 

 town in an escarpment or long line of inland cliff facing 

 northwards, towards Lake Ontario. The Niagara, on reach- 

 ing the escarpment and issuing from the gorge, enters the 

 flat country, which is so nearly on a level with Lake Ontario, 

 that there is only a fall of about four feet in the seven ad- 

 ditional miles which intervene between Queenstown and the 



shores of that lake. 



It has long been the popular belief that the Niagara once 

 flowed in a shallow valley across the whole platform, from the 



* The reader will find in my Travels 

 in North America, vol. i. ch. 2, a coloured 

 geological map and section of the Nia- 



referred more fully to these and to 

 Mr. Hall's Eeport on the Geology of 

 New York, as well as to the earlier 



gara district, also a bird's-eye view of writings of Hennepin and Kalm in the 

 the Falls and adjacent country, coloured same work, and have speculated on the 

 geologically, of which the first idea was 

 suggested by the excellent original 

 sketch given by Mr. Bake well. I have 



origin of the escarpment over which the 

 falls may have been originally precipi- 

 tated. Vol. i. p. 32, and vol. ii. p. 93. 



