Niagara Falls 



1841 or only covered by vegetable mould, until we arrive at the 

 boulder clay, which is sometimes within a few yards of the top 

 of the precipice, and sometimes again retires eighty yards or more 

 from it, being from twenty to fifty feet in height. I also found 

 an old river-bed running through the drift parallel to the 

 Niagara, its course still marked by swamps and ponds, such as 

 we find in all alluvial plains, and only remarkable here because 

 the river now runs at a lower level by 300 feet. This deserted 

 channel occurs between the Muddy River and the Whirlpool, 

 and is 100 yards broad. 



There is also a notch or indentation, called the " Devil's 

 Hole," on the right or eastern side of the Niagara, half a mile 

 below the Whirlpool, which deserves notice, for there, I think, 

 there are signs of the Great Cataract having been once situated. 

 A small streamlet, called the " Bloody Run," from a battle 

 fought there with the Indians, joins the Niagara at this place, and 

 has hollowed out a lateral chasm. Ascending the great ravine, 

 we here see, facing us, a projecting cliff of limestone, which 

 stands out forty feet beyond the general range of the river cliff 

 below, and has its flat summit bare and without soil, just as if 

 it had once formed the eastern side of the Great Fall. 



By exploring the banks of the Niagara above the Fails, I sat- 

 isfied myself that if the river should continue to cut back the 

 ravine still farther southwards, it would leave here and there, 

 near the verge of the precipice and on its islands, strata of sand 

 and loam, with freshwater shells similar to those already 

 described. I collected fossil shells, for example, on the left bank, 

 near the Chippewa River, and learnt that others had been 

 reached, in sinking a well, in 1818, at the south-east end of 

 Grand Island. 



The patches of fluviatile strata, therefore, occurring between 

 the old banks of drift and the precipice, and not having been 

 met with on other parts of the platform at a distance from the 

 Niagara, confirm the theory, previously adopted on independent 

 evidence, of the recession of the Falls from Queenston south- 



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