The Susquehanna, steadily gaining in volume, flows in wayward course down rapids and around many bends to Binghamton, near the southern border of New York, where it receives the Chenango River, and its elevation has declined to eight hundred and sixty feet. This is a busy manufacturing city and railway junction, having forty thousand inhabitants. The first settlers came in 1787, and William Bingham of Philadelphia owning the land at the confluence of the rivers, the town was afterwards named for him. The Chenango Canal connects the Susquehanna waters from here with the Erie Canal, about ninety miles northward, at Utica, the Indian word Chenango meaning "the bull thistle." Entering Pennsylvania, the Susquehanna now flows many miles past mountain and village, around great bends and breaking through the Allegheny ridges, passes along the Wyoming Valley, already described, and finally going out through the Nanticoke Gap, reaches Northumberland, where it receives its chief tributary, the West Branch. This great stream comes for two hundred miles from the westward through the Allegheny ranges, passing Lewisburg, the seat of the Baptist University of Lewisburg, Milton, and the noted lumber town of Williamsport, famous for its great log boom. This arrangement for collecting logs cost a million dollars, and extends about four miles up the river above the town, with its massive piers and braces, and will hold three hundred millions of feet of lumber. The river front is lined with basins and sawmills. In earlier years this boom has been so filled with pine and hemlock logs in the spring that the river could almost anywhere be crossed on a solid floor of timber. Unfortunately, however, the vast forests on the slopes of the Alleghenies have been so generally cut off that the trade has seriously declined. At Northumberland lived Dr. Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen gas, who died there in 1804, and is buried in the cemetery.