THE GREEN LAKES OF ONONDAGA. "Lo! Nemi! naveled in the woody hills, So far, that the uprooting wind which tears Its foam against the skies, reluctant spares The oval mirror of thy glassy lake; And, calm as cherished hate, its surface wears A deep, cold, settled aspect naught can shake, All coiled into itself, and round, as sleeps the snake." CHILDE HAROLD. [Dec., "His look" (that of Professor Teufelsdrockh) "had the gravity as of some silent, high-encircled mountain pool-perhaps the crater of an extinct volcano-into whose black deeps you fear to gaze; those eyes, those lights which sparkle in it, may, indeed, be reflexes of the heavenly stars, but, perhaps, also glances from the region of Nether Fire!"-SARTOR RESARTUS. "It is described by Strabo as lying deep and darksome, surrounded by steep banks that hang threatening over it. Black, aged groves stretched their boughs above the watery abyss."Article AVERNUS, Encyclopædia. OF all the elements of scenery, water is the most various in its character, and capable of the greatest diversity of effect. Think but a moment, and how rapidly examples, proving this assertion, rise to memory. The long swell of the Pacific, the bright waves of the Mediterranean, the clear expanse of the St. Lawrence, the impetuous-rolling Mississippi, the dark trout-stream shaded under the American forest, the Scotch "burn, stealing under the long, yellow broom," the fountain of Vaucluse, the huge welling springs of Florida, the remote Baikal, that strange water-filled chasm in the Siberian earth, the cypress-skirted lake of the Dismal Swamp, the terraced steeps of Como, the cold, desolate, fir-bordered Superior. There is nothing more replete with associations of every character, whether bright or sombre. The refined intelligences of the poet and the painter are not more strongly impressed with these influences than are the rude and superstitious minds of common humanity. The invisible boundaries of seas, the sources of unexplored rivers, the depths of unfathomed lakes-all are fields in which the robust native imagination of man finds pleasant room to wander, and whence it brings hosts of vague fantastic forms. The depths of the sea were peopled with naiads. Somewhere beyond the horizon's rim, the mariner thought -To reach the happy isles, And see the great Achilles, whom he knew." The renowned Domdaniel, seminary for all evil magicians, was under the waters of the Red Sea. sullen Avernus was the path to Hades. Across the The northern mind saw the mermaid haunting the shores of Orkney-the kelpy rising from the twilight pool. nights, to sweep over the lake of KilO'Donoghoe emerges on moonlight larney. From the gloomy Mummelsee, at full moon, ascend its lilies, transformed into a chain of maidens, who dance till dawn along the strand. The last fairies in Scotland, according to Hugh Miller, were seen about the burn of Eathie. Egeria was met only beside her spring; the Muses loved best the sod around their fountain. From the cold and forbidding lake on Mount Pilatus, the troubled shade of the old governor of Judea rises to spread cloud and chill over the country around. Holy wells, sacred rivers, are found from the shores of the Western Ocean to the mountains of India. stories, no ghostly legends associated In America are no fairies, no elfin with localities. The supernatural has no hold among us, and as to aught invisible, unsanctioned by the Catechism, our northern and western minds are infidel. Else would our rivers, our lakes, our fountains own some wild and graceful legends; if not such as are born in Teutonic or Celtic minds, at least some orphan superstitions, adopted by us on the decease of their parents, our red predecessors on this soil. Of the last, indeed, there are some, but in their translation into our civilized speech and thought, they undergo a backward transformation, and from flitting butterflies become dull grubs. Such as they are, however, we we must take them or none; and the only one connected with the theme of this article is thus narrated in "“Clark's History of Onondaga:" "The Indian path leading from Oneida to Onondaga passed along the brink of this pond. Here an Indian woman lost her child in a marvelous manner, and, in order to have it restored to her again, made application to the Prophet for advice. He told her the wicked spirit had taken her child from her, but, if she would obey his injunctions, the Great Spirit would take charge of the child, and it would be safe, although it could not be restored. In the autumn of every year, the woman and her husband, and after them their children, were required to cast a quantity of tobacco into the pond, as an oblation for the spirit's guardian care. This office was religiously performed until after the first settlement of the white people at Onondaga, since when it has been discontinued. The name given to the lake, on account of this circumstance, was Kai-yahkoo, signifying satisfied with tobacco." This is a bald enough story as it is told, yet, perhaps, one which, more gracefully narrated, and with less business-like brevity and directness, might have been an effective one; raising to our imagination the still, patient attitude of the red woman, as, centuries ago, she stood on the brink where the green upper precipice of förest surmounted the lower gray precipice of rock, gazing into the blank green waters, far beneath which lurked the invisible expectant of her offering. There is certainly a fitness in the association of such a legend with so wild and strange a place. Other lakes lie open among sloping hills, perhaps with an occasional rocky cliff along the shore, but margined elsewhere with meadows; the winds drive their waves freely hither and thither, wild-fowl plash on the surface, snipes and plover course along the beaches, cheerful life abounds around them. This, however, is a far different body of water. From a generally level plateau, sinks abruptly a huge circular basin, of perhaps twenty acres. In its bottom, surrounded on three sides by a ring of mural precipice, a hundred and fifty feet high, lies a small lake of the deepest green. "A silent precipice above, A sleeping tarn below." The rocky walls which sweep round it, crowned in part with woods, in part only tufted with straggling bushes of cedar, clinging, as it were, to the cornice of this natural amphitheatre, suggest a comparison with the Niagara whirlpool; though no two conditions of water can be more different than that boiling "hell of waters," and this changeless lake. On the fourth side, like the open end of a horse-shoe, this circling wall is broken away, and a level valley opens, filled with forest, on the tree-tops of which we look down. The pond seems shallow on the side next this opening, but all around the other three sides its depth is sudden, the rocky débris of the cliffs sloping directly into the clear green element. Of its actual depth we fortunately know nothing, having never sounded it, so that the abyss beneath the green mirror may be imagined indefinite. It appears to be so considered in the popular mind thereabout, for we were told of adventurous explorers who had fathomed its waters ineffectually, letting down "bedcords on bedcords" with a stone tied to the end, which seems to have only swung vaguely in the dim midregion below, groping ineffectually for bottom, and not touching so much as a sunken tree top. In Clark's "Onondaga," above quoted, we are informed that a hundred yards of line have failed to reach its floor, and that the water has a depth of a hundred feet within half that distance from the shore. This we doubt, yet deny not, for it is our earnest wish that it may be unfathomable. This lake, Kai-yah-koo, lies in the town of De Witt, about a mile west of Jamesville. Another, very similar to it, is to be seen some two or three miles further eastward; and two more, different in some respects, but showing many features of analogy, and equally remarkable, lie at a lower level, about two miles northeast of the village of Fayetteville, in the town of Manlius. To one of these the quotations, with which we have headed this paper, are singularly appropriate. Turning north from the "old Seneca turnpike," at a red gate on the land of Mr. Collin, about a mile and a half east of Fayetteville, we drive across a couple of fields to a dense body of woodland which has hardly felt the axe. Through this, between the tall trunks of maple and tulip tree, under the dark boughs of hemlock, and the arches of the elm, we follow, for half a mile, a "woodroad," a narrow wheel-path connecting two farms, and serving as a winter highway to draw firewood and timber; a smooth, half-beaten track like a park "drive." Turning from this to the right, and following for a short distance a still ruder path, we tie our horses to a sapling, and descend, on foot, a narrow gully worn in the steep hillside, arched with boughs and green with all the wild growths which love a wild ravine. Fern and orange-flowered touch-me-not, and Indian turnip, with the spotted clusters of convallaria and the scarlet and white berries of cohosh, wake-robin and lady slipper, grow rank in their season on either hand; while in autumn, the showering leaves are heaped, deep and moist, over the narrow path. As we go on, there is a gleam of water through the tree-trunks and boughs before us, not pale with the reflection of clouds, or blue with that of the clear skies, but of a peculiar green; and if the day be gloomy, no one who has once read them will fail to recall the musical as mystical lines of Poe "The skies they were ashen and sober, The leaves they were withering and sere, Coming to the margin, the banks sink here it grows vigorously. Individual trees of it abound, of all sizes, from the bright green conical bush to the venerable trunk two feet in diameter, which, gradually curves upward, tapering first slanting outward from the bank, through the ragged dry boughs about its base and the thin foliage which drapes its upper portion, till the tall, sharp, dead point rises straight upwards like a lightning rod, a pinnacle where the fly-catcher watches, and whence the floating gossamer streams in the sun. Hemmed in by this wall of.wood, the echo of a shout or pistol-shot circles round and round, and seems gradually to escape into the upper air. Such shores are a fit margin for such a lake, a fit deep, hollow brow for such an eye as gleams from their cavity. The color of the water is, as we have. said, very remarkable. Where it reflects the open sky, it approaches & pale, ultramarine blue; but in the shade of overhanging trees, it shows a peculiar transparent green, and, partly from its clearness, seems as if a lighter and rarer fluid than common water. Its transparency deceives the eye. When a boy, we went in for a swim with a companion, who, after several vain attempts to stand on a sunken tree-trunk, discovered that, in order to put his feet upon it, his head must be five or six feet beneath the surface. As deep as the eye can reach, it is, near its margin, filled with sunken trees, of which successive generations appear deposits on them a white, marly coating, to lie beneath each other. The water which renders many of them strikingly conspicuous, when seen from the heights above, stretching their skeleton-like lengths far toward the centre of the pond, and thrusting up their topmost limbs twenty or thirty yards from shore. In and out, among their tangled boughs, swim little rock bass, looking like black imps suspended in the thin element; and we have sometimes seen a large fish come slowly up along the slant bottom, and turn to melt again out of sight 66 coming like a shadow, so departing." Up from such a wet cavern one might expect to see emerging a Pterichthys, or some such early tenant of the waters, here hidden since the silurian ages; or, perhaps, some enchanted fish, like those of which we read in the Arabian Nights, as speaking from the frying-pan at the summons of the stately damsel with the myrtle wand; or those which, in Bowscale tarn, obediently swam to and fro in open sight, servants of the eye of the shepherd lord of Brougham Castle; and it is unsatisfactory to be told that the form, making such a mysterious appearance and exit, is but a stupid and lazy sucker foraging for his dull food. Something weird should inhabit this abyss; and it was with a sense of fitness that we once saw a snake, which we disturbed on the bank, take to the water, and go wriggling and undulating out of sight beneath the surface. He seemed a legitimate imp of the Old Serpent, bound direct to the court of his master; and our readers may the more fully agree with us in this fancy, when we mention that the water of this pond, near its bottom, is strongly sulphurous. So we found it, one bright summer day, when we floated across its surface from shore to shore, on a rude raft, sounding at intervals. The lead showed an average increase in depth of nearly one foot to every two feet of distance from shore, or a subaqueous slope of 20 to 22 degrees, till we approached the centre, around which was a large level space, the flat bottom of this Devil's Punchbowl. This floor is 156 feet below the surface of the water, which is about 140 feet below the edge of the bluff banks around, so that the total depth of the basin, below the surrounding land, is about 300 feet. Were Trinity Church, by the power of that Adversary to whom this pit seems properly to belong, placed in its bed, the chime of bells would be stifled in the flood, and the pinnacle would not rise above its steep banks. We tied a tightly-corked bottle to our sounding lead, and when it had descended to about 140 feet, a sudden increase of weight indicated that it had lost its air and buoyancy. On recovering it, we found the cork driven in, and the bottle filled with water of a thorough brimstone odor, which, when poured on a clear silver coin, turned it black in a few minutes. The lake has its scaly tenants, but there seem to be few living things inhabiting its borders. No water-fowl haunt its surface, for there is no shoal water where they can reach their food. The sides plunge so steeply down, that there is not a wading place for the heron, nor a yard of beach for the sandpiper. Dark forest-mould extends to the brink, and ferns droop over the water. There is little or none of the aquatic vegetation so abundant in most lakes. No lilies here, as in the Mummelsee, raise their white heads and cover the surface with their broad leaves -no pickerel-weed or eel-grass form pale meadows beneath the waters. The tangled, sunken brushwood is the only retreat which the fish can harbor in. Aquatic insects are consequently few, and as for shell-fish we never saw any. Thus the spot is unattractive to waterfowl, though one might think that deepsea diver, the loon, might sometimes be found here, drawing his bright wake across the still water, and waking the circling echoes with his scream. The common forest-birds haunt the woods around; here, in spring, may be heard, ringing through the leafy arches, the clear bell-tones of the thrush, here the jay calls and whistles, and the woodpecker laughs as he drums and rattles on the dry pine-top in the sun. These sounds, however, are but occasionally heard, and even then, from their associations with lonely forest scenery, they seem but to make the surrounding silence and solitude more impressive. The stillness of this sheltered basin is scarcely broken by the wind. We have sat on the high northern bank while a fresh breeze was waving the boughs around us, yet the pond below was smooth as glass, except where occasional stray "cats-paws" were creeping over it in a fickle, indeterminate sort of manner, ruffling the clear water, here and there, as a breath clouds a mirror, and, like it, vanishing again to leave the surface as calm and bright as before. Looking from this point late in the afternoon, the effect of shadow is singularly rich and bold. The slant rays fall full on the eastern shore, bringing into distinctness every individual treetop, every bare trunk and bleached stub, and laying bare all the recesses among the foliage. But under the steep western declivity all is dark and dim, the shadows obscure and blend together its draping masses of maple, hemlock, birch, cedar, and sumach, and deepen the tint of the sleeping waters beneath, until one can hardly tell where the dark foliage ends and its reflection begins. We have mentioned that there are two other lakes of this general character near Jamesville-Kai-yah-koo and another. The one we have last Its described has also its fellow close by, entirely resembling it in its sudden depth and rounded outline, but differing in that it has a prolongation from its eastern side, running, for nearly half a mile, between the gradually declining hills to the level plain near the Erie canal. This prolongation is from twenty to seventy-five feet deep (the lake itself about 165), its banks everywhere abrupt, and its bottom, in many places, of white marl, gleaming clearly through twenty or thirty feet of water. waters (with those of the upper pond, which flow into it through an intervening level valley), are discharged by a clear, brisk stream, through a meadow filled with masses of rough travertine, undoubtedly deposited by the water, as the like material, of which St. Peter's and the Coliseum are built, was deposited by the Anio. Though the waters of this outlet and of the surface of the lake are drinkable, its depths are as sulphurous as those of its neighbor, a fact to which it owes the ill-omened name of "Lake Sodom," under which it has been briefly described in several scientific tours and geological reports. We may be permitted to end our paper with a little cool investigation into the causes which have produced these remarkable basins, and they may skip it who fear that it may dispel the mystery which broods over their still wa ters. The bowl-like form of these hollows suggests to every visitor the idea that, like the lake of Nemi or those of the Eifel, they occupy the craters of old volcanoes. The circular form, the steep banks, the depth, and the sulphurous quality of the waters, seem to indicate such an origin, and no other of the ordinary geological agencies which theorists so freely employ seems competent to their formation. For lakes, whose basins are supposed to have been eroded or worn out by the elements, possess more gradual slopes, at least at their extremities where they connect with valleys; such is the character of all our other lakes of Western New York, such as the Cayuga, Seneca, Skeneateles. While, on the other hand, lakes whose basins are made by the upheaving of their rocky borders, show, in the tilted and distorted strata around, evidence of the forces which raised those barriers. But here the abruptness of the banks, the sudden depth of the basins, the cir cular form of their outline, and their want of connection with other valleys or water courses, forbid the belief that these hollows were eroded, or, in geological phrase, "denuded" by water or flood. No current could form such a cavity, or even remove loose materials from it, and leave its form so perfect, its shores so sheer. And, in the undisturbed position of the horizontal strata, which form the encircling bluffs, we have evident proof that no uplifting forces have been at work to hem in the basins. Neither agency, of erosion or upheaval, will account for them, and the apparently plausible idea of volcanic origin is forbidden, not only by the undisturbed position of the strata around, but also by the entire absence of lava, scoriæ, or other volcanic products. Our own opinion is, that they were formed by the subsidence of the strata which once occupied their sites; in other words, that they are simply great "sink-holes," in each of which the bottom has fallen in, and let down the superincumbent strata bodily into a deep pit. Such cavities, on a small scale, are common in many districts, and nowhere more so than in this vicinity. All about Syracuse, "natural wells" or "sinks" are frequent in the soft, gypseous shales which contain the sources of their saline springs, and they are occasionally known to be formed even at present. The huge deposit of rock and clay, known as the Onondaga Salt Group (in which the bottoms of all these lakes lie), is very pervious to water, which, as it is known to undermine lesser masses, may have acted in the same manner on greater. It seems quite probable that these lakes, of twenty or forty acres each, now occupy the sites of huge masses of soluble earth which have disappeared, or possibly of immense deposits of salt marl or rock salt, which may have filtered in solution through subterraneous crevices to that deep, gravel-filled basin, over which (but separated from it by a water-tight bottom of marl,) lies the Onondaga lake, and from the lower part of which the salt wells draw the water to supply the thousands of evaporating vats and kettles at Syracuse and Salina. If so, the old saline masses have quite disappeared from their original beds; for, in an analysis of the water drawn from the depths of the lake we have described, |