






























78 ROCK RUINS. 
and shaped these hills about us, and that great valley you: 
der. Do you men who study rocks think so too?” w 
The old man, without other help than his own eyes and 
appreciative love of nature, fostered by the daily contemp 
tion of a fine landscape, had unconsciously retraced the pri- 
mary steps of geological history, and rediscovered the f 
that water is one of the great agents of change upon the 
earth’s surface. 
He had seen it working, and comprehended how it 
slowly, but with irresistible power, melting down hills, fur- 
rowing out valleys, and casting the muddy flow through 
thousand channels into the sea. The patient contemplata 
of a view such as one often meets with,—a quiet valley 
sleeping between parallel ranges of hills, with wrinkled si 
and bald summits, had taught him this. 
When we should wish, however, to describe the effect 
water upon the face of our continent, it is not best to begil 
with such complicated examples, but good sense dictates th 
introduction of a few special cases wherein water is eviden 
the sole agent of change. Thus a ladder is presented to h 
mind by which it may climb to the comprehension of th 
panorama, instead of being presented at once with ger 
laws, and then carried down backward upon the rounds 0 
fact and explanation. ra 
Perhaps but very few of the thousands who annually 
that Mecca of the travelling public, Niagara, are aware 
it furnishes one of these examples, and is so often a 
for geological writers and lecturers. Visitors pay the e 
tionate prices of admission to its various points of view, # 
made giddy by the mad whirl of the rapids, stunned by t 
roar of the water, and awe-struck by the vibrations of t 
earth, and yet do not intelligently comprehend the mea 
of all this turmoil and uproar. They read in the gt 
books the meagre notice of the fact, that the cataract 
once at Lewiston and has eaten its way back through 
solid rock to its present position. Some accept the § 
