The Niagara River Author:Archer Butler Hulbert General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1908 Original Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons Subjects: Niagara River (N.Y. and Ont.) Niagara River Valley (N.Y. and Ont.) Niagara River Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you bu... more »y the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: Chapter III The Birth of Niagara GEOLOGIC time presents to the scientist one of the most difficult problems with which he has to deal. When the different divisions into which he would divide the ages are numbered by thousands and even millions of years, the human mind is appalled at the prospect; and when the calculations of different geologists vary by hundreds of thousands of years, the lay mind can not help growing somewhat credulous, and at times be tempted to discard the whole mass of scientific data relating to the subject. Niagara River forms one of the best, if not the best, means of studying the lapse of time since the Ice Age. Finding, as students do here, the best material in existence for this study, leads to exhaustive scientific analysis of every clue presented by the Cataract and the deep Gorge it has cut for itself through the solid lime rock and Niagara shale forming its bed. We are prone to look upon the great wonders of the world as destined to last as long as the earth itself. We do not realise that the mountains, miles in height, are slowly crumbling before our eyes, or realise that the rivers are carrying them slowly toward the sea, filling the lakes and lower portions of land along their courses. These slow but ceaseless forces are continually at work, reducing the surface of the earth to that of a level plain and at the same time depriving the land of its lakes by filling their depressions with silt. The winds and the waters, together with the...« less