"There is in Brazil," says Elisée Reclus, "not far from Bahia, the wonderful cataract of San Francisco, known by the name of Paulo Affonso. At the foot of a long slope over which it glides in rapids, the river, one of the most considerable of the South American continent, whirls round and round as it enters a kind of funnel-shaped cavity, roughened with rocks, and suddenly contracting its width, dashes against three rocky masses reared up like towers at the edge of the abyss; then dividing into four vast columns of water, it plunges down into a gulf two hundred and forty-six feet in depth. The principal column, being confined in a perpendicular passage, is scarcely sixty-six feet in width, but it must be of an enormous thickness (depth), as it forms almost the whole body of the river. Half way up, the channel which contains it bends to the left, and the falling mass, changing its direction, passes under a vertical column of water, which penetrates through it from one side to the other, and breaking it up into a chaos of surges, converts it into a sea of foam. Sometimes the white, misty vapor may be seen, and the thunder of the water may be heard at a distance of more than fifteen miles." The spray and roar of Niagara are often seen and heard at Toronto, forty miles away, across Lake Ontario. In Norway is found the highest perpendicular fall in the world that is constantly supplied with water. It is the Keel-fos, formed by a mountain stream that falls two thousand feet into the Navöens Fjord near Gudhaven, but the water becomes a mere billowy bank of mist before it reaches the bottom. The Riunkan-fos is another Norwegian cataract in the outlet of Lake Mjösvard, which pours through a wild, rock-studded slope until it reaches a precipice, on the brink of which it is divided by a huge mass of rock into two channels. Thence it falls eight hundred and eighty feet into a dark basin at its foot, from which water-rockets and sharp jets of foam shoot up and out in all directions. The intense whiteness of the fleecy column is indescribable.