Science, Geology and Physics 



upon the face of the earth! " The author fails to tell us the name of 1796 

 this ingenious "American writer." Pne»t 



VOLNEY, CONSTANTIN FRANCOIS CHASSEBOEUF, Comic de. A 1796 

 view of the soil and climate of the United States of America. . . . Volney 

 Tr. by C. B. Brown. Phil.: J. Conrad and Co. 1804. Pp. 80-94. 



A translation from the French original published in 1 803. The author 

 travelled extensively in America in the latter years of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury. A large portion of his book is given up to the physical geography 

 of the eastern section of the United States. 



Some late travellers have considerably elucidated this sur- 

 prising physical phenomenon; but as they have chiefly dwelt 

 upon its influence, as a spectacle, upon the eye, and paid little 

 or no attention to its topographical circumstances, of which the 

 spectacle is merely an effect, I shall confine myself principally to 

 the consideration of it in the latter view, in which it is by no 

 means unworthy of attention. 



It is surely a wonderful fact in geography, that a river, very 

 near 2500 feet wide, and generally fifteen in depth, should find 

 the level of its channel suddenly sink beneath its stream, and 

 should throw down its entire mass of water, from a height of a 

 hundred and forty-four feet, into a channel through which it 

 pursues its subsequent course, where the spectator can discover 

 no hill or ridge that could once have restrained or blocked up 

 its passage. One cannot, at first, conceive by what position or 

 direction of the surface nature has led to the production of this 

 astonishing scene; but, when the process is discovered, we are 

 equally astonished at the obvious simplicity of the means, and the 

 grandeur of the end affected by them. 



To enable the reader more clearly and distinctly to conceive 

 this picture, we must remind him, that the country between Lake 

 Erie and the Ohio is a vast plain, higher, in its general level, than 

 almost all the rest of the continent, as is proved by the course 

 of its rivers, some of which flow into the north Atlantic, and 

 others into the Gulph of Mexico. 



On the northern side, having skirted Lake Erie, and 

 32 497 



