Science, Geology and Physics 



two which falls from west to east. I wished a hundred times 1841 

 that somebody had been with us, who could have described the yc 

 wonders of this frightful fall. In the mean time, accept the fol- 

 lowing draught such as it is." — From his plate it appears that 

 this third cascade was produced by what he terms " the elbow " 

 caused by the projection of the table rock, which must then have 

 been more prominent than now. 



Seventy-three years afterwards, or in 1 75 1 , a letter was pub- 

 lished in the Gentleman's Magazine for that year by Kalm, the 

 Swedish botanist, on the Falls of Niagara. His description is 

 also illustrated by a plate, in which the proportional height and 

 breadth of the Falls are given more correctly. The lesser Fall on 

 the left bank of the river is omitted; but at the place where it 

 had been represented in Father Hennepin's sketch, Kalm inserts 

 the letter " a," referring to a note in which he says, '* Here the 

 water was formerly forced out of its direct course by a projecting 

 rock, which when standing turned the water off obliquely across 

 the other Fall." 



This observation confirms the reality of Hennepin's oblique 

 cascade, and shows that some waste had been going on in the 

 intermediate seventy-three years, making a visible alteration in 

 the scene, and leading us to infer that the rocks have been suffer- 

 ing continual dilapidation for more than the last century and a 

 half. 



In the absence of more ample historical data, we are for- 

 tunately not without geological evidence of the former existence 

 of a channel of the Niagara at a much higher level, before the 

 table-land was intersected by the great ravine. Long before 

 my visit to the Niagara, I had been informed of the existence 

 on Goat Island of beds of gravel and sand containing fluviatile 

 shells, and some account had been given of these by Mr. Hall 

 in his first report in 1839; I therefore proposed to him that we 

 should examine these carefully, and see if we could trace any 

 remnants of the same along the edges of the river-cliffs below 

 the Falls. We began by collecting in Goat Island shells of the 



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