northward course. Finally, at about seven miles from the present Falls, we come to the edge of a declivity which informs us that we have been hitherto walking on table-land. At some hundreds of feet below us is a comparatively level plain, which stretches to Lake Ontario. The declivity marks the end of the precipitous gorge of the Niagara. Here the river escapes from its steep, mural boundaries, and, in a widened bed, pursues its way to the lake, which finally receives its waters.
The fact that, in historic times, even within the memory of man, the fall has sensibly receded, prompts the question, How far has this recession gone? At what point did the ledge which thus continually creeps backward begin its retrograde course? To minds disciplined in such researches the answer has been, and will be, at the precipitous declivity which crossed the Niagara from Lewiston, on the American, to Queenstown, on the Canadian side. Over this transverse barrier the united affluents of all the upper lakes once poured their waters, and here the work of erosion began. The dam, moreover, was demonstrably of sufficient height to cause the river above it to submerge Goat Island; and this would perfectly account for the finding by Mr. Hall, Sir Charles Lyell, and others, in the sand and gravel of the island, the same fluviatile shells as are now found in the Niagara River higher up. It would also account for those deposits along the sides of the river, the discovery of which enabled Lyell, Hall, and Ramsay, to reduce to demonstration the popular belief that the Niagara once flowed through a shallow valley.
The physics of the problem of excavation, which I made clear to my mind before quitting Niagara, are revealed by a close inspection of the present Horseshoe Fall. Here we see evidently that the greatest weight of water bends over the very apex of the Horseshoe. In a passage in his excellent chapter on Niagara Falls, Mr. Hall alludes to this fact. Here we have the most copious and the most violent whirling of the shattered liquid; here the most powerful eddies recoil against the shale. From this portion of the fall, indeed, the spray sometimes rises, without solution of continuity, to the region of clouds, becoming gradually more attenuated, and passing finally through the condition of true cloud into invisible vapor, which is sometimes reprecipitated higher up. All the phenomena point distinctly to the centre of the river as the place of greatest mechanical energy, and from the centre the vigor of the fall gradually dies away toward the sides. The horseshoe form, with the concavity facing downward, is an obvious and necessary consequence of this action. Right along the middle of the river the apex of the curve pushes its way backward, cutting along the centre a deep and comparatively narrow groove, and draining the sides as it passes them.[1] Hence the remarkable discrepancy between the widths of the Niagara above and below the Horseshoe. All along
- ↑ In the discourse this action was illustrated by a model.
