Travelers' Original Accounts Since 1840 



Every tourist must visit Niagara but need not re-describe at 1880 

 length the great Falls, about whose beauty and sublimity ^ ,d 8 eon 

 enough has perhaps been said. . . . There is none for the 

 usual prettiness of a cascade about this fall, whose enormous mass 

 constitutes its chief claim to the admiration of the world. The 

 river splits on Goat Island, but the bulk tumbles over the Cana- 

 dian, or Horse-shoe Falls, beside which the American falls look 

 like a weir. And the eye soon selects the crown of the horse- 

 shoe as the central point of the picture. There, a translucent 

 curve of green water bends slowly from the horizontal to the 

 vertical, and plunges with apparent deliberation over the preci- 

 pice, to lose itself almost immediately in froth and mist, while 

 out of the hell-broth below rise clouds of the finest spray. These 

 children of the air give the chief beauty to Niagara, for the 

 smooth, repeated liquid curves and restless foam soon pall on the 

 eye. The mist on the other hand, changes from beauty to beauty 

 with every alteration of atmospheric conditions. Sometimes it 

 sways hither and thither, like gauze in the shifting winds; at 

 others it rises in unbroken columns whose capitals float away in 

 billowy cumuli to join their shining companions in the blue. 

 When the air is moist and the wind blowing gently from the falls, 

 the valley becomes filled with luminous fog. On rarely bright 

 still days, a shaft of vapour rises to more than a thousand feet 

 in height, forming a stationary pillar of cloud, white as snow 

 above where it is lost by absorption, and iridescent below where 

 its base is wreathed in rainbows. . . . 



The strata on either side of the gorge, being nearly horizontal 

 and formerly continuous, early suggested the idea that the falls 

 once poured over Queenstown Heights, and have cut their way 

 back to their present position. The existing lip of the cataract 

 is a bed of hard limestone about eighty feet thick, supported by 

 a similar thickness of friable shale. The falling water gives rise 

 to extremely violent blasts of wind in the space between itself 

 and the rock, which is consequently lashed with a perpetual storm 

 of heavy spray. As the soft shales gradually yield before this 



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