142 Proceedings of the British Association. 



of a remarkable cataract in the Cherokee country, called Ovnay Kay 

 Amah, or White Water, which he visited in 1837, and which had 

 not attracted the attention of any other traveller. This cataract was 

 at a point several miles from the extreme edge of the mountain, and 

 was upwards of 600 feet high, the water falling in various pitches and 

 inclined planes from the top to the bottom. Wherever the water 

 found a depression in the surface of the gneiss it lodged there, and 

 on the first fortuitous pebble coming into the cavity the work of des- 

 truction would begin, the current incessantly whirling about the 

 pebble, and grinding the sides of the rock until a pot-hole was formed. 

 These were there in great numbers, some of them four feet in diame- 

 ter and six feet deep. Where great numbers abounded, the parietes 

 became at length weak, and, giving way, all the pot-holes would 

 coalesce into one. This process being repeated in various portions 

 of the rock, the cohesion of the mass became diminished ; and at the 

 season of periodical floods, huge masses, weighing forty-tons and 

 upwards, would be precipitated to the bottom. This was the state 

 of the great fragments at the bottom of the ravine, all of them bear- 

 ing evidence of having been dislocated by the power of the water 

 exercised upon the pot-holes. Such was the method by which this 

 gorge, several miles long and about 600 feet in depth had been 

 ground out of this mountain of gneiss. At this locality were the 

 evidences of the volume of the river having once been at least ten 

 times larger than at present. A semi-circular ledge of gneiss, at the 

 top, east of the stream, and 1,200 feet wide, was worn bare for a 

 great distance, and down its perpendicular face was concave, as if the 

 river had been projected over the top, and the screen of water in face 

 of the concavity, and the concussion, and the moisture, had produc- 

 ed the usual effect, of peeling off the coats of the rock. It presented 

 much such an appearance as the rock at the Horse- Shoe Fall at 

 Niagara would do, if the water were to be so much diminished at 

 that point as to abandon it, and to be projected only from the com- 

 paratively small fall of the Schlossa, on the American side of the 

 river. For the other example of the subtracting , or undermining 

 power exercised in the recession of cataracts, the Falls of Niagara 

 were taken, of which a flat view was given, together with a section of 

 the rocks. Mr. Featherstonhaugh had published a paper in 1831, 



