Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/500

496 before his eyes one looks and looks in vain for a depauperated and enfeebled cataract. The flow of water is of course diminished, but to the occasional visitor it is but mathematically perceptible. Citizens of Niagara Falls who have the cataract daily before the eye have insisted that the loss of water is perceptible, and that such loss is felt in other ways is seen in the now annual gorging of the ice in the American channel at the upper end of Goat Island, which lays bare the American channel, sends all its water to Canada, and which very rarely happened when the depth of the water was normal.

The two active American companies are not going to use any less water than now, but are vigorously increasing their output and building new power houses to meet their growing market. Indeed, one of them, realizing its close approach to statutory limits, has established itself on the Canadian side. These two companies are permitted to consume the following amounts of water:

The water abstracted by these companies is in no small degree wasted, that is to say the power produced is no equable measure of the amount of water taken from the river. This page carries a picture familiar to a thousand eyes—the view of the American bank below the steel arch bridge. This has been termed 'the backyard view of Niagara. The little cascades springing from holes in the side of the bank at various heights are the wasteways of the factories above. Some of these cascades are now encased in flumes and made productive at the bottom of the cliff, but this is only a recent change designed to save the wasted power, but involving the construction of a row of factories or wheel pits all along the edge of the water. The fall from the height of waters where these two companies have their intakes, to the base of the cataract, is approximately 224 feet, far beyond the working possibility of the turbine pit. The outrush of water at the base of the cliff near the bridge anchorage is the discharge of the great tunnel of the Niagara Falls Power Co., which is the tail-race from the wheel pits far back up the city and far above in the rocks.

On the Canadian side the activity in the erection of power works has been more strenuous. Utter devastation of the natural beauties of Queen Victoria Park, the demolition of islands and creeks, the excavation of the rock surface to the complete obliteration of well-known landmarks, have been the accompaniments of the unparalleled endeavors and achievements here. Whoever has visited this part of the Falls region since the beginning of these gigantic operations has sought in vain for the Dufferin Islands and Crescent Island, and what must have seemed to him an inextricable chaos of rock excavations, of