Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/503

Rh of the engineers is 224,000 cubic feet per second. It is in cubic feet per second that we prefer to express our statements; the attempt to put them in terms of horse-power is attended with too many uncertainties.

The potential or theoretical horse-power of this volume of water falling in the cataract is variously, sometimes carelessly stated in the engineers' reports as from three to six millions. A recalculation gives it at 3,800,000 for the cataract, which would be increased by the additional fall from the height of the rapids to the crest of the Falls. Goat Island, picketing the frontier, divides the waters unfairly, giving much more than three-fourths of their volume to the Canadian side,

though the international boundary established by the Treaty of Ghent lies at the line of deepest water. Now as less than one fourth of the total volume of the waters pours down the American channel and this channel is much shallower than the other, it is at once evident that abstractions of water will make themselves first perceptible in the shoaling of the American channel. At the parting of the waters above Goat Island the great current of the river moves to the west, and converges into the funnel of the splendid Horseshoe Falls. The American channel actually carries in comparison but a feeble flow and the whole American cataract is in extremely delicate equilibrium. A competent hydraulic engineer, taking the accepted volume of