Niagara Falls 



1841 deserve its name. Goat Island has lost several acres in area in the 

 last four years, and I have no doubt that this waste neither is, nor 

 has been, a mere temporary accident, since I found that the same 

 recession was in progress in various other waterfalls which I 

 visited. . . . Mr. Bakewell calculated that, in the forty 

 years preceding 1830, the Niagara had been going back at the 

 rate of about a yard annually, but I conceive that one foot per 

 year would be a much more probable conjecture, in which case 

 35,000 years would have been required for the retreat of the 

 Falls from the escarpment of Queenston to their present site, if 

 we could assume that the retrograde movement had been uniform 

 throughout. This, however, could not have been the case, as 

 at every step in the process of excavation the height of the preci- 

 pice, the hardness of the materials at its base, and the quantity 

 of fallen matter to be removed, must have varied. At some 

 points it may have receded much faster than at present, at others 

 much slower, and it would be scarcely possible to decide whether 

 its average progress has been more or less rapid than now. 



Unfortunately our historical evidence of the former condition 

 of the cataract is meagre and scanty in the extreme. Sixty years 

 ago, the whole district between Lakes Erie and Ontario was a 

 wilderness in which the Indian hunter chased the bear and the 

 buffalo. When at Boston, my attention was called by Mr. 

 Ingraham to a work translated from the original French of 

 Father Hennepin, a missionary who gave a description of the 

 grand cataract and a plate of it, as it appeared in the year 1 678. 

 It is not wonderful that coming suddenly upon the Falls which no 

 European traveller had ever seen before, he should have believed 

 them to be twice their real height. " Betwixt the lakes Ontario 

 and Erie," he says, " there is a vast and prodigious cadence of 

 water, which falls after an astonishing manner, insomuch that the 

 universe does not afford its parallel. As to the waters of Italy 

 and Swedeland, they are but sorry patterns of it, and this won- 

 derful downfall is compounded of two great falls, with an isle 

 in the middle, and there is another cascade less than the other 



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