The Woodville Republican

Niagara Falls Crumbling:

Empires are said to crumble away. They won by loaves, they are lost by crumbs, and more than a year since, that portion her Majesty's dominions represented Table Rock, gave us a pretty extensive specimen of this process of crumbling, and last week Brother Jonathan, who never permits himself to be beaten, gave us an exhibition of the same kind, with an improvement. On Sunday afternoon, a portion of the precipice near the tower on the east side of Goat Island, fell with a mighty crash. This portion extended from the edge of the Island toward the tower, being about 125 feet long and about 60 feet wide, of a somewhat elliptical shape, and reaching from the top to near the bottom of the cliff. The next day another piece triangular with a base of about forty feet, broke off just below the tower. But the next great performance was the most remarkable. Between the two portions that had previously fallen, stood a rectangular projection, about thirty feet long and fifteen wide, extending from top to bottom of the precipice. This immense mass became loosened from the main body of rock, and settled perpendicularly about eight feet where it now stands an enormous column two hundred feet high, by the dimensions above named. If it stood out upon an open plain, as did Cleopatra's Needle when first reared, how insignificant the latter would appear, and what a "realizing sense" might we have on a summer's day of the shadow of a rock in a weary land! It is most probable that this column will also fall when the weather becomes warmer. The severity of the winter, and the long continuance of the intense cold, have produced these results. They are splendid exhibitions of the slow, persevering, resistless power of the venerable white-whiskered Mr. John Frost. By this freezing process he disengaged these great masses of rock from the thousand strata, then held them in his cold hand until the genial south wind induced him to relax his hold, and they were precipitated into the chasm below.

Niagara Falls Iris