Niagara: A History of the Falls by Pierre Berton Page A

practice of law. This was the first of several journeys that brought about a revolution in his thinking and would spark a corresponding revolution in geology. His Principles argued that there was a natural – not a supernatural – explanation for every geological phenomenon, that the process of geological development worked so slowly that the earth must be much older than was believed, and that modern geological processes (mountain building, for instance) didn’t differ from ancient ones. In short, there never was a series of divine cataclysms, and the existence of mankind on earth was relatively short.
    Darwin drew heavily on Lyell’s methods and style. The Principles , Darwin declared, “altered the whole tone of one’s mind.” Even when observing something never seen by Lyell, “one yet saw it partially through his eyes.” It is not too much to say that without Lyell’s pioneer work, The Origin of Species might not have been written.
    Lyell arrived at Niagara on August 27, 1841, and got his first view of the Falls from a point three miles downriver. The sun was shining full on the cataract and there was no building in view to suggest the presence of civilization – “nothing but the green wood, the falling water, and the white foam.” To Lyell, the twin cataracts were even more beautiful than he had expected, though not so grand. In geological interest, they were “far beyond my most sanguine hopes.” The splendour of Niagara grew on him, as it did on so many others, after several days. “I at last learned by degrees to comprehend the wonders of the scene,” he said, “and to feel its full magnificence.”
    He, too, noted with mild asperity the harsh encroachment of industrialization on the ethereal world of the cataract. The steam railway had arrived, and Lyell wrote that “it has a strange effect when you have succeeded in obtaining some view of the Falls … to be suddenly awakened out of your reverie by the loud whistle of a locomotive drawing a load of tourists, and of merchants trafficking between the east and west, who discuss the Falls in three hours between two trains.” On the other hand, “Goat Island is the most perfect fairyland that I know.” He feared that within a decade it would be given over to factories.
    Lyell spent his days at Niagara roaming the gorge, climbing the cliffs, and collecting specimens – shells, fossils, and, in one case, fragments of a mastodon skeleton – in order to determine the geological history of the region. His guide, the botanist Joseph Hooker, who had explored Goat Island, told him of the great slabs that had tumbled from Table Rock in 1818 and again in 1828 as the river chewed into the softer strata beneath. Hooker also pointed out an indentation about forty feet long that had been carved in the middle ledge of limestone in the American Falls since 1815.
    During the same period, Lyell learned, the river’s erosion had also changed the shape of the Horseshoe Falls, while in just four years Goat Island had lost several acres. Various estimates for the age of the river had been advanced by earlier writers. Robert Blakewell had figured it at ten thousand years – a hypothesis Lyell had accepted in his Principles . Others, assuming an erosion rate of a foot a year, calculated that the Falls must have started their retreat from Queenston some thirty-five thousand years earlier. Lyell now tentatively settled on this figure. That presupposed that the erosion rate had been uniform everywhere, but as we know – and as Lyell guessed – it would have been faster at some points, slower at others. Was its current average progress more or less rapid than in the past? That he could not determine.
    We can see him now in retrospect, a stooped figure because of his poor eyesight, digging into the shale with his trowel and squinting at the fossils he discovered. With the American geologist James Hall he collected specimens both from the beaches of Goat Island and from