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mighty leap of the torrent at the top. The consequence is, that the water seems to be tumbling into a bottomless abyss-with a deafening roar, intensified by the same currents of air which carry the drenching spray.

I am inclined to think, however, that the most impressive of all the scenes at Niagara is one of which comparatively little is said. The river Niagara above the Falls runs in a channel very broad, and very little depressed below the general level of the country. But there is a steep declivity in the bed of the stream for a consider able distance above the precipice, and this constitutes what are called the Rapids. The consequence is, that when we stand at any point near the edge of the Falls, and look up the course of the stream, the foaming waters of the Rapids constitute the sky-line. No indication of land is visible-nothing to express the fact that we are looking at a river. The crests of the breakers, the leaping and the rushing of the waters, are all seen against the clouds, as they are seen in the ocean when the ship from which we look is in the "trough of the sea." It is impossible to resist the effect on the imagination. It is as if the fountains of the great deep were being broken up, and as if a new deluge were coming on the world. The impression is rather increased than diminished by the perspective of the low, wooded banks on either shore, running down to a vanishing-point and seeming to be lost in the advancing waters. An apparently shoreless sea tumbling toward one is a very grand and a very awful sight. Forgetting there what one knows, and giving one's self up to what one only sees, I do not know that there is anything in nature more majestic than the view of the Rapids above the Falls of Niagara.

A very curious question, and one of great scientific interest, arises out of this great difference between the course of the Niagara River above and below the Falls. It has, in my opinion, been much too readily assumed by geologists that rivers have excavated the valleys in which they run. In innumerable cases the work thus attributed to rivers is a work wholly beyond their power. Under certain conditions, no doubt, the cutting power of running water is very great. When the declivity is steep, and when the stream is liable to floods carrying stones and gravel along with it, the work of excavation may be rapid. On the other hand, when the declivity is gentle, when the quantity of water is not liable to sudden increase, and when it carries little foreign matter, it may run for unnumbered ages without producing more than the most insignificant effect. Much also depends on the disposition of the rocks over which a river runs. If these, from their texture or from their stratification, present

edges which are easily attacked or undermined, even a gentle stream may cut rapidly for itself a deeper bed. On the other hand, when the rocks do not expose any surfaces which are easily assailable, a very large body of water may be powerless to attack them, and may run over them for ages without being able to scoop out more than a few feet or even a few inches. Accordingly, such is actually the case of the Niagara River in the upper part of its course from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario. In all the ages during which it has run in that course for fifteen miles, it has not been able to remove more than a few feet of soil or rock. The country is level and the banks are very low, so low that in looking up the bed of the river the more distant trees on either bank seem to rise out of the water. But suddenly, in the middle of the comparatively level country, the river encounters a precipice of one hundred and sixty-five feet deep, and thenceforward for seven miles runs through a profound cleft or ravine, the bottom of which is not less than three hundred feet below the general level of the country. Now the question arises how that precipice came to be there? This would be no puzzle at all if the precipice were coincident with a sudden declivity in the general level of the country on either side of the river. And there is such a declivity-but it is not at Niagara. It is seven miles, farther on. At the Falls there is no depression in the general level of the banks. Indeed, on the Canadian shore the land rises very considerably just above the Falls. On the American shore it continues at the same elevation. The whole country here, however, is a table-land, and that table-land has a termination-an edge-over which the river must fall before it can reach Lake Ontario. But that edge does not run across the country at Niagara, but along a line much nearer to Lake Ontario, where it is a conspicuous feature in the landscape, and is called the Queenstown Heights. The natural place, therefore, so to speak, for the Falls would have been where the river came to that edge, and from that point the river has all the appearance of having cut its way backward in the course of time. The process is still going on, and arises from a cause which fully explains the powerful action of the river in its lower course and its very feeble action in its upper course. The bed of rock over which the water flows from Lake Erie is a hard limestone, and it lies nearly flat. This is precisely the kind and the position of rock in which water acts most slowly. But underneath this bed of limestone there is another bed of a soft, incoherent shale. At the edge of the table-land, of course, this bed becomes exposed when the vegetation of the declivity is washed away by a river falling over it.

In a climate so severe as that of Canada, even in our own time, the annual freezing of the spray, and of the dripping water, and the annual thawing of it again in spring, have the effect of making the bed of shale crumble away very rapidly; consequently the upper bed of limestone becomes constantly more or less undermined. Its own hardness and tenacity enable it to stand a good deal of this undermining, and it stands out and projects as a "table-rock." But at last too much of its support is eaten away, the weight of water passing over it exerts a leverage upon its outer edge it tumbles down, and the edge of the waterfall thus retreats to the point where the underlying shale is still able to support the limestone ledges. The rate at which this cutting back of the Falls of Niagara is still going on is sufficiently rapid to be observable in the memory of man; and it is obvious that, assuming this rate to have been constant, it is possible to calculate the number of years which have elapsed since the river began to tumble over the precipice at Queenstown. Sir Charles Lyell came to the conclusion that the rate of cutting back is about one foot in each year. At that rate the river would have taken thirty-five thousand years to effect its retreat from Queenstown to the present position of the Falls. This is a very short fathom-line to throw out into the abysmal depths of geological time. But it is one of the very few cases in which something like a solid datum can be got for calculating even approximately the date at which the present configuration of the terrestrial surface was determined, and the time occupied in effecting one of the very last, and one of the very least, of the changes which that surface has undergone. Of course, it is quite possible that the rate of cutting may not have been at all uniform, that a greater severity of climate, some ten thousand or twenty thousand years ago, may have produced as much effect in one of those years as is produced in ten or twenty years under existing conditions. But, making every allowance for this possibility, the principle of the calculation seems to be a sound one. The deep groove in which the Niagara River runs from the Falls to the Queenstown Heights does seem to be a clear case of a ravine produced by a known cause which can be seen now in actual operation. As far as I could see, there is nothing to indicate that the ravine is due to a “fault" or a crack arising from subterranean disturbance. And, even if some such cause did commence the hollow, it seems nearly certain that by far the greater part of the work has been done by the process which has been described. The result as to years is, after all, by no means a very startling one. Thirty-five thousand years is an insignificant fraction of the time which has certainly

been occupied in some of the most recent operations of geological time.

If the Cataract of Niagara had continued to be where it once was, it would have given additional splendor to one of the most beautiful landscapes of the world. Instead of falling, as it does now, into a narrow chasm, where it can not be seen a few yards from either bank, it would have poured its magnificent torrent over a higher range of cliff, and would have shone for hundreds of miles over land and sea. Of this landscape I confess I had never heard, and I saw it by the merest accident. In the War of 1812 the Americans invaded Canada at Queenstown and seized the steep line of heights above that town, which form the termination or escarpment of the comparatively high table-land of the upper lakes. The American forces were attacked and speedily dislodged by the British troops under the command of General Brock. This brave officer, however, fell early in the action, and a very handsome monument, consisting of a lofty column, has been erected to his memory on the summit of the ridge. Being told at the hotel that "Brock's Monument " was an object of interest, and that from it there was a "good view,” we drove there from Niagara. We found a "good view," indeed. No scene we met with in America has left such an impression on my mind. It is altogether peculiar, unlike anything in the Old World, and such as few spots so accessible can command even in the New. One great glory of the American Continent is its lakes and rivers. But they are generally too large to make much impression on the eye. The rivers are often so broad as to look like lakes without their picturesqueness, and the lakes are so large as to look like the sea without its grandeur. Another great glory of America is its vast breadth of habitable surface. But these again are so vast that there are few spots indeed whence they can be seen and estimated. But from the heights of Queenstown both these great features are spread out before the eye after a manner in which they can be taken in. The steep bank below us is covered with fine specimens of the Thuja occidentalis, commonly called the cedar in America. Looking to the northeast, the horizon is occupied by the blue waters of Lake Ontario, which form the sky-line. But on either side the shores can be seen bending round the lake to an illimitable distance, and losing themselves in fading tints of blue. To the left, turning toward the northwest, the fair Province of Ontario stretches in immense plains and in escarpments of the same table-land. The whole of this immense extent of country has the aspect of a land comfortably settled, widely cultivated, and beautifully clothed with trees. Towns and villages are in

dicated by little spots of gleaming white, by smoke, and a few spires. To the left, on the Canadian shore, and seen over a deep bay, the city of Toronto is distinctly visible when the atmosphere is clear. At our feet the magnificent river of the Niagara emerges from its ravine into the open sunlight of the plains, and winds slowly in long reaches of a lovely green, and round a succession of low-wooded capes, into the vast waters of Ontario. The contrast is very striking between the perfect restfulness of its current here and the tormented violence of its course at the Falls, at the Rapids, and at the Whirlpool.

The six or seven miles of road between Niagara and the heights of Queenstown afforded me my first opportunity of seeing a bit of Canadian country in detail. The farms seemed to be of very considerable size—the cultivation careless, so far as neatness is concerned, and manifesting that complete contempt of economy of surface which is conspicuous over the whole of North America. Straggling fences, wide spaces of land along the roads left unappropriated, irregular clumps, and masses of natural woododd corners left rough and wild-all these features proclaimed a country where economy in culture was wholly needless and never attended to. The vast landscape from Brock's monument, along both shores of Lake Ontario, as far as the eye could reach, exhibited the same characteristic features. They are features eminently picturesque, combining the aspects of wildness with the impression of exuberant fertility and of boundless wealth.

Of the country between Niagara and Kingston-that is to say, of the whole northern shores of Lake Ontario-I saw nothing except what could be seen from a railway-train. It had evidently a great uniformity of character, except at the northwestern corner of the lake, round the head of the deep bay, between Hamilton and Toronto. Here one gets a glimpse of a consider able extent of land which is still "uncleared," and covered with a forest vegetation which is predominantly pine—with margins, however, everywhere, and with watery creeks occasionally, rich in the lovely foliage of tangled birch and oak and aspen. In striking contrast with these indications of a land not yet redeemed from a state of nature, we dashed past, near Toronto, the most elaborate and admirable preparations for a great agricultural exhibition on the most advanced type of European civilization.

Of the scenery of the St. Lawrence between Kingston and Montreal, I can only say that its sole attraction is in the majesty of the river, and that, where that majesty is lost by the river becoming merely a series of lakes, the view is irredeemably monotonous. The banks are very low;

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the houses visible upon them are too often like wooden boxes; and it is only at a few spots that the trees exhibit any effective masses of foliage. A labyrinth of little rocky islets, rising out of tranquil water, and divided from each other by intricate channels and creeks and bays, with changing vistas of lights and shadows and reflections, must always be beautiful in its own way. But the famous "thousand islands" of the St. Lawrence can not be compared with the analogous scenery in many of the lakes of Europe, and especially of Scotland. The general uniformity of elevation in the islands themselves, and the utter flatness of the banks on either side, give a tameness and monotony to the scene which contrasts unfavorably indeed with the lovely islets which break the surfaces of Loch Lomond and Loch Awe. But, on the other hand, wherever the St. Lawrence reveals itself to the eye, not as a series of lakes, but as a rushing river-then, indeed, its course becomes wonderfully impressive. It is worth crossing the Atlantic to see the Rapids of the St. Lawrence. Such volumes of water rushing and foaming in billows of glorious green and white can be seen nowhere in the Old World. They speak to the eye of the distances from which they come of the Rocky Mountains which are their far-off watershed in the west; of the vast intervening continent which they have drained; of the great inland seas in which they have been stored and gathered. These rapids are the final leaps and bounds by which they gain at last the level of the ocean, and the history of their triumphant course seems as if it were written on their face.

Few cities in the world are more finely situated than Montreal. For many miles above it the monotony of the banks of the St. Lawrence is relieved by distant views of the Adirondack Hills-a remarkable isolated group rising out of the great plains which stretch far southward into the State of New York. In front also, that is, in the direction of the river, but also on its right bank, a long mountain-range appears. These are the mountains in the hollows of which lie the Lakes Champlain and George. The Canadian shore likewise presents distant elevations which break the horizon and give it interest. As we approach Montreal the steep hill from which it derives its name rises finely above the river, which rushes swiftly round pleasant islands and past the handsome quays and public buildings of the city. Built along the slope of the hill, and rising along that slope to a very considerable elevation, the houses much mixed with trees, and the top of the hill richly clothed with wood, full of the towers and spires of handsome churches, the city of Montreal occupies a position of conspicuous beauty; nor do its attractions diminish on a closer

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inspection. Long lines of handsome streets, with comfortable and substantial houses or villas, and generally shaded by double rows of trees, lead us up to the higher levels, where gardens and shrubberies are pleasantly intermixed. Under the hospitable guidance of Dr. Campbell, an old and hereditary friend, we were driven round the mountain," which has been secured by the municipality as a public park. From the whole of this fine hill the prospect is magnificent. For many miles above, and for many miles below, the course of the noble river is to be seen, which is here more than a mile wide, and which up to Montreal is navigable for vessels of a large size. The vast extent of country over which the eye ranges in every direction has the same general character as that seen from the heights of Queenstown. It is everywhere richly wooded, and, although the mountains which vary this landscape are not broken or picturesque in surface, they have fine and flowing outlines, with long and habitable slopes.

It was with no small pleasure that I made the acquaintance of that distinguished man, Principal Dawson, of McGill College, with whose writings on Canadian geology I had been long familiar, and over whose most interesting collections I had time only to cast a very hasty glance. Of Quebec I need not speak. Its peculiar situation is so well known, and the beauty of the view from its citadel has been so often described, that one's expectations are in very close corre spondence with what one finds. The St. Lawrence, however, at Quebec is no longer a river, but an estuary-a very fine estuary certainly, but in point of picturesqueness by no means so beautiful as the estuary of the Clyde, or even of the Forth. Like all the other fine prospects which I saw in the New World, its loveliness is in the vastness of the surfaces over which the view extends in its immense vanishing distances of water and of land. The peculiar steeples of the French-Canadian churches alone remind one of the Old World. In everything else the view has all the characteristic features of the American Continent. The great range of the Laurentian Hills, which rise below Quebec on the Canadian shore, are by no means impressive. In that immense horizon, and in that clear atmosphere, they have not the effect of mountains, but of a series of low, rounded, swelling hills, without any broken outlines or rocky surfaces, and wholly covered with wood, very uniform in size and color. They fall toward the St. Lawrence in long and gentle slopes, dotted with farms and villages, except when in the farthest distance the view is bounded by a somewhat steeper headland. The surface over which one looks is more beautiful on the opposite side of the river, to the south

and southwest, that is, toward the distant boundary of the United States. In that direction the eye ranges over a great extent of country rising to very distant uplands, and with the intervening spaces well marked by the perspective of lowwooded points, knolls, and ridges. To look from the height of some three hundred feet down on such an estuary, covered with ships and boats of all sorts and sizes, and with such a prospect beyond, all bathed in sunlight, shining through the fine, clear air of Canada, must always be exhilarating. But at Quebec this great pleasure is heightened by the inseparable associations of the place the memory of Wolfe and of Montcalm.

The hollows and recesses of the Laurentian Hills in the neighborhood of Quebec are often occupied by small lakes. An expedition to one of these the Lake of Beauport-enabled me to see in detail the character of the range and of the forests which clothe it. The drive led us through an open country full of comfortable farms and villas. As we approached the lower slopes of the hills, I was delighted to see the characteristic rocks of that oldest of all the sedimentary deposits of the globe, which from this range of hills has been called the Laurentian gneiss. The mineral aspect of rocks is by no means always a safe guide to their geological position. There are sandstones, and limestones, and slates, and quartzites of all ages, and one of these is often so very like another as to be hardly distinguishable even by a practiced eye. But the mineral aspect of the Laurentian gneiss is an aspect which, to those who are familiar with it, can never be mistaken. In the loose blocks which lay scattered in profusion upon the ground on either side of the road, and in all the walls and dikes which had been built for fences near it, I recognized in a moment the fine crystals of hornblende and of feldspar, with which I was familiar in the Island of Tyree, one of the Hebrides, and on the west coast of Sutherland. The rock, wherever it was visible in situ, presented surfaces rounded and smoothed by the passage of floating ice. It was pleasant, too, to pass a real little "burn," a fast-running little stream, making its way in trouty pools and ripples over stones and gravel. Presently we were among the woods-such delicious woods of aspen, and white birch, and maple, with only just a little mixture of spruce and balsam fir. The aspen in Canada is very often the exclusive growth which comes up after the pine forests have been burned. The bark is of a rich, creamy white, and its leaves have a very soft and tender green. Mosses of great beauty attracted my attention as handsomer than any of the same family with which I was acquainted at home. A few grassy clearings in a rolling country, otherwise entirely

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covered with thin, shaggy wood, led us gradually into a glen with the sound of waterfalls, and this glen opened into an amphitheatre of hills, from five hundred to eight hundred feet high, very steep, and entirely covered with heavier timber, both evergreen and deciduous. Pines predominated toward the top, although even here they by no means stood alone. But the sides of the hills, often so steep as to be almost precipitous, were covered with elm, and ash, and the black birch, a very handsome tree, not unlike the wychelm in habit of growth. Embosomed in these lovely woods and hills lay the little Lake of Beauport, with its gleaming waters of azure blue, the tall forest trees rising from the edges of the lake in every variety of size and foliage. The fish were shy, and, if we had depended on the success of my fly-fishing, our means of refreshment would have been but scanty. But in the pleasant little inn, log-built and verandaed, we found an excellent supply of the finest trout, and methods of cooking them which left nothing to be desired.

A very pleasant cruise in the steamer Druid began with a run for some thirty miles up the Saguenay River. This enabled me still more perfectly to appreciate the general appearance of the forests of the Laurentian Hills. The Saguenay is a very remarkable feature in the scenes and in the geology of Canada. It is a deep cleft or crack cutting through the range, probably due originally to some great "fault" in the stratification, but no doubt subsequently deepened by that agent of erosion which was at its maximum of power during the glacial period. So profound is this cleft that for the distance of about fifty or sixty miles the soundings are upward of one hundred fathoms, so that, except in a few bays where small streams have brought down deposits, and round the shores of a few islands, there are no anchorages for vessels. The scenery is undoubtedly very peculiar and very pretty, but it is far less impressive than I expected. The hills are too uniformly covered with forest, there are very few fine precipices or rock surfaces exposed to view, there are no peaks rising high above the general level, and the outlines are rounded and monotonous. There is, however, great beauty of detail, both in some portions of the forest scenery and in features still more minute. On one of the few bare, rocky points which lay in our way we landed, and I was much struck by the lovely vegetation which was growing among the rounded surfaces of stone. Besides a profusion of bilberry and cranberry plants in full flower, there was a perfect garden of the most lovely lichens and mosses. Some of these presented the most exquisite dendritic forms in diverse tints of silver-gray, of a delicate green, and of efflo

rescent white, which it would be very difficult to paint, and which it is impossible to describe. Any attempt to preserve them was futile. On being handled, they immediately crumbled into fine powder. But that rocky point was a very paradise of cryptogamic botany.

I can not pass from the lower St. Lawrence and the Saguenay without mentioning one very great peculiarity of its scenery, and that is the population of white porpoises which inhabit these waters. These curious creatures are as pure white as a kid glove, and, when seen opposite to the light and against the blue water, they are as beautiful as they are peculiar. They seemed to be very numerous, tumbling about on all sides of the vessel, especially toward the mouth of the Saguenay, where we spent a delicious evening amid the glories of a Canadian sunset in the height of summer.

A fishing excursion to the Restigouche River, which is the boundary stream between the Provinces of Canada and New Brunswick, took us by the Intercolonial line of railway across the broad belt of land which lies between the shores of the St. Lawrence and those of the Bay of Chaleur. It was in passing through this belt of country, between Rivière du Loup, on the southern bank of the St. Lawrence, and Matapediac, at the head of the Chaleur Bay, that I first gained what I supposed to be a fairly adequate idea of the primeval forests of North America. Strictly speaking, it is not in its primeval condition, because throughout the whole, or nearly the whole, of this great extent of country the one most valuable pine for purposes of commerce has been "lumbered out." That pine is the white pine of the markets—the Pinus strobus―commonly called in England the Weymouth or New England pine. But all the other trees have been allowed to remain, and, where the white pine did not grow abundantly, the forests are in a state of nature. For some miles from the St. Lawrence the country is settled, and clearings which we saw in progress show that even soil which is so heavily encumbered, and which looked by no means rich, is

nevertheless capable of rewarding agricultural industry. But the interior is one vast and continuous forest, in part of which a great fire was raging, and in another part of which it had done its work in leaving a large area covered with nothing but the scorched and blackened stems. Huge volumes of yellow smoke were rolling over the large Matapediac Lake, the waters of which, with their islands covered with pine and cedar, seen through the thick and stifling air, had a most weird effect. As the train rushed through these forests, I saw only one specimen of the white pine, of great size, to show what the tree can be in its native habitat. In England and in

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