And now the scene and the effect it produces on the beholder both change. The rapids are beautiful; the falls are grand; those are exhilarating, these are inspiring; those are noisy, turbulent, fickle; these are calm, resistless, inexorable.
After the water has made the final plunge over the precipice the cataract acquires its most impressive characteristics; the majestic monotone, the bow, the cloud, which is its veil by night, its crowning glory and beauty by day. The combinations of grandeur and beauty have reached their climax in the fall, the foam, the voice, the spray, the bow.
[Illustration: THE RAPIDS ABOVE THE FALLS]
The chasm of the river from the Falls to Lewiston will be sufficiently described in treating of the geology of the district. From Lewiston to Lake Ontario, seven miles, the waters of the river flow on through an elevated and fertile plain, in a strong, calm, majestic current, smiling with dimples and reversed in occasional eddies, but neither broken by rapids nor impeded by islands. Finally it is lost in the lake, after passing an immense bar formed by the enormous mass of sedimentary matter carried down by its own current. The landscape, as seen from the top of the terrace above Lewiston, is one of the finest and most extensive of its peculiar character which can be found on the continent, all its features being such as appertain to a broad, open country.
The visitor at Niagara, as he looks at the Falls, will have a profounder appreciation of their magnitude by considering that it requires the water drainage of a quarter of a continent to sustain them, and that the remoter springs, which send to them their constant tribute, are more than twelve hundred miles distant.
Niagara a tribal name--Other names given to the tribe--The Niagaras a superior race--The true pronunciation of Indian words.
The name Niagara has been so thoroughly identified with the river and the Falls that the question whether it was also the name of an Indian nation or tribe has been quite neglected. It is proposed now to give the question some consideration, assuming, at once, its affirmative to be true. This, it is believed, we shall be justified in doing by every principle of analogy. We know that it was a general practice of the Indians who occupied this region of country, so abounding in lakes and rivers, to give the name of the nation or tribe to, or to name them after, the most prominent bodies and courses of water found in their territory. Such was the fact with the Senecas, Cayugas, Oneidas, Onondagas, and Hurons, the tribal name of each being perpetuated both in a lake and a river. The Mohawks, the warrior tribe of the Six Nations, having no noted lake within their boundaries, left a perpetual memorial of themselves in the name of a beautiful river. The unwarlike Eries, too, though finally exterminated by their more powerful and aggressive neighbors, the Iroquois, are still remembered in the lake which bears their name.