Niagara: A History of the Falls by Pierre Berton

beside the river for any length of time could see the result of that erosion – great platforms of rock crashing into the gorge, piles of talus heaped below the smaller fall, caves hollowed out behind the tumbling curtain.
    During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, a number of Niagara observers, on the basis of this evidence, tried to reckon the real age of the river. In 1790, one Niagara observer, William Maclay, pointed out to the surveyor-general of the United States (who had himself been studying the rate of attrition) that people who had lived along the gorge for thirty years insisted that the Falls had moved twenty feet upriver in that time. At that rate, he said, the river was 55,440 years old.
    Such calculations did little to shake the religious faith of the masses. As late as 1834, George Fairholme, a “scriptural geologist,” argued that the Falls was formed “immediately subsequent to the restoration of order after the Mosaic Deluge” and was now no more than five thousand years old.
    Those who held that the earth had developed over an enormous span of eons through a series of gradual changes were considered heretics. Others, attempting to justify the Biblical story, theorized that the earth had developed as a result of a series of sudden, and indeed supernatural, shocks in which mountains had been thrust up almost overnight while gigantic tidal waves had destroyed all life. After each death-dealing upheaval, new life had been reintroduced by God himself, improving by stages until modern man emerged. Now the world was complete and perfect, as the Deity intended.
    With these various theories Charles Lyell, the author of the three-volume, trail-breaking Principles of Geology , had no patience. “Never was there a dogma more calculated to further indolence and to blunt the keen edge of curiosity,” he declared. Always clear-headed, Lyell touched off the revolution in geology that marked the Victorian Age and paved the way for Charles Darwin’s seminal work.
    Lyell knew and admired Darwin, and yet when he reached Niagara in 1841, he did not share his friend’s theory of evolution, a theory that had yet to see print. More than twenty years would pass before Lyell came to accept it. But he knew a great deal about the age of the earth, for he had examined fossils, shells, and strata in his wanderings across Europe. Principles had already been published. In these volumes Lyell indicated his debt to earlier observers who had studied the geology of the area. As for Fairholme, he had never visited the cataract and never would. Lyell did, and in just ten days neatly disposed of the theses of the Fairholme school, although many people stubbornly continued to believe them.
    He was a handsome man, Lyell, with long, ascetic features and the high dome and broad forehead of a savant. He was the eldest of ten children of a bookish family in Scotland. His father had an abiding interest in nature, and young Lyell was a great one for shinnying up trees, hunting for birds’ nests, and collecting butterflies. He was always as much a naturalist as he was a geologist.
    Actually, Lyell was trained as a barrister. A sophisticated member of Lincoln’s Inn, he was briefly a regular on the circuit court of southern England. In his spare hours, he played the flute and read a great deal of poetry. Milton was his favourite; no doubt Lyell, who had ruined his eyes poring over law books, identified with the sightless poet. He himself would be nearly blind in the evening of his life. His weak vision and his frail physique did not stop him from scaling cliffs and scrambling down river banks in England and Europe, examining strata and collecting old shells and other fossils from prehistoric seas in an effort to discover the origins of river valleys. On these occasions, it was said, he was insensible to both fatigue and heat.
    By 1828, when he set off on a nine-month trip through France, Italy, and Sicily, Lyell had abandoned the