Niagara Falls 



1877 



1877 NASH, WALLIS. Oregon: there and back in 1877. . . . Lond. : 



Na.h Macmillan. 1878. Pp. 264-271. 



In the words of the author: " It is right to apologize for saying one 

 word about Niagara, since to most readers it must be assumed to be 

 familiar from their earliest years, still to pass it by in silence would be 

 almost to insult it." His account is lightly, but, nevertheless, well done. 



1877 VlVIAN, HUSSEY H. Notes of a tour in America, from August 7th 



Vivian to November 17th, 1877. Lond.: Stanford. 1878. Pp. 36-40. 



It impressed me with a sense of its own grandeur, and of the 

 impotence of man, more than anything I ever saw. . . . 



To convey an impression in the least degree adequate appears 

 to me impossible. If to be viewed in a material sense, let the 

 Engineer take his formula and calculate the equivalent of two 

 million tons of water per minute, say 35,000 tons per second, 

 falling from a height of 1 60 feet ; and then let him say how many 

 miles of locomotives, or how many first class ocean steam engines, 

 or how many tons of " Ocean " steam coal the material force 

 of Niagara represents. . . . Or, to view it from an aesthetic 

 point, imagine a sea of raging waters, perhaps a mile and a half 

 wide, dashing over ledges of rock, foaming, tossing its billows 

 high into the air — on which no living thing floats, on which no 

 living thing has ever floated and lived — rushing madly down 

 a steep incline, suddenly contracted by the curving western shore 

 into perhaps one third of its former width, and then leaping with 

 one tremendous bound over a precipice of 160 feet; where 

 shallow, broken at once into foam, but where deep (for per- 

 haps 150 yards in width in the centre of the Fall) holding 

 together in one green mass, for some sixty feet, and then sepa- 

 rating into a seething veil of purest white, the whole volume 

 dashing on to the rocky beach below, its contact lost in thickest 

 vapours, then emerging, churned into snow-white foam which 

 circles round and round for ever and for ever beneath the cata- 

 ract, deafening with its roar, drenching all around with its spray, 

 a column of white vapour rising high into the sky and floating 



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