her machinery, I observe, was made at Dundee, possibly of Swedish iron. The day was beautiful; the sun sparkling in the water; the boat running swiftly along, and the passengers numerous, gay, evidently good-humoured folk, who had set out determined to enjoy themselves. Between eating, drinking, smoking, admiring the scenery, and three-card Loo, we got on very successfully; and in eight hours were landed at the hamlet of Lilla Edet. The scenery on the Gotha is not fine: marshes on each side reach to flat fields, bounded by hills skirting the river-valley, at the distance of half a mile on each side. These hills are mere knobs or hummocks of gneiss, scantily covered with soil, and with edges of granite occasionally shooting up through it. As we approach Lilla Edet the hills close in, and the scenery resembles the tamest views on the Cumberland Lakes. It is water sleeping between green banks and woods, and the current is scarcely perceptible till near Lilla Edet. We landed on the right bank, the river ceasing to be navigable on account of rocks in the channel. Having hired a four-wheeled vehicle and a pair of horses, we drove about sixteen miles to a ferry, where we crossed to the locks of the celebrated Trollhætta Canal, at the foot of the great waterfall. Our road was over an open country, apparently well and carefully cultivated in the plain and valleys; but the hills, although of small elevation, are bare knobs of rock shooting up through the earth, without a particle of soil on them. These naked ribs of gneiss and granite run

through the country, like the bare bones of some giant-skeleton, leaving between them small intervals skinned over with a thin covering of soil, and forming, together with the river-valley, the only parts of the country capable of cultivation. Every patch of soil seemed occupied. The rest of the country in view, to the extent, I should think, of four-fifths of the surface, was naked rock, without even moss or heath. When a country containing a great extent of such land is compared as to the number of inhabitants with other regions, it is to be remembered, that of the square mile of 640 acres there should be thrown out of the account perhaps 200 acres or more, as bare rock, or waters producing neither subsistence nor employment for man. With this allowance, I should suppose, from the many odd nooks and corners in which houses are set down, and attempts made at cultivation, where six or eight sheaves of corn only could be raised, that land is scarce even in proportion to the population; and that every square mile of what really is land is inhabited as densely as in other cultivated countries. Small patches of soil between the rocks, which, in a territory where good soil was plentiful, would be neglected as inconvenient, are here occupied. Without some correction of this kind, the statements of the number of inhabitants to the square mile in different countries furnish no correct data for comparing the agricultural industry of one country with that of another.

The canal of Trollhætta did not appear to me a work of such great magnificence as it is often con

sidered. The idea originally formed by Charles the Twelfth was undoubtedly bold, and superior to his age. The splendid inland sea called the Wenner is connected on one side by a chain of lakes with the Baltic, and on the other by the river Gotha with the North Sea. The Falls of Trollhætta, on the Gotha, are the only impediment to a free navigation from the ocean into the Baltic. The idea of overcoming it by a series of locks was the conception of a great mind, but the execution is lamentably defective. The locks strike the eye at once as too narrow for vessels of sufficient breadth of beam to navigate the Baltic, the North Sea, or even the Wenner, yet unnecessarily wide for canal boats or river barges. This defect appears extraordinary; since, great as the undertaking was, the execution consisted chiefly in excavating a very hard and solid rock, in which every inch quarried was gained for ever, and any dimensions whatever could have been given by patience and gunpowder. There were none of those natural difficulties to contend with, such as soft soils in the sides, loose sands or gravel, slips of clay, springs, rivers, valleys, or hills to turn or surmount, and all that variety of obstacles which place canal engineering among the highest efforts of human intellect. As a work of art, the Trollhætta cannot be placed by the side of the Caledonian Canal; the difficulties were vastly inferior; and in the execution of the locks, lock-gates, stone-work, and in the finish of the whole, it cannot be compared to its rival, which, in its present state of perfection, is undoubtedly

the finest work which Scotland can show to the stranger. In consequence of this defect in the Trollhætta Canal, it is proposed to excavate another of greater width of lock by its side it is not probable, however, that such an undertaking would ever defray the expense. Commerce is somewhat wayward, and will not take the road which governments and ministers point out. The Trollhætta and Caledonian Canals are similar in one respect; both, in proportion to their cost, are almost equally useless. The Trollhætta, however, serves to convey wood from the Wenner Lake to the saw-mills at the Falls, and from the mills to the navigable part of the Gotha. The north and west coasts of the Wenner are the principal districts for timber. The blocks of wood, that is, the trunks of the trees divested of bark and branches, are floated down the rivers which run through the forests in the back country, and fall into the Wenner in the neighbourhood of Carlstadt: they are there shipped in schooners and sloops, which carry from fourteen to forty dozen blocks; and they are transported, at the freight of five dollars banco per dozen, to Trollhætta, where they are sawed into planks. The saw-mills are erected on the very edge of the cataract. The boldness of their situation is one of the most striking features of Trollhætta. The Falls are the most magnificent in the north of Europe; but it were idle to attempt to describe the scenery.

Trollhætta is a village containing nearly a thousand inhabitants, and a large and good inn. A

party of actors from the opera-house at Stockholm, unfortunately for us, possessed the best accommodations. These French of the North, as Voltaire calls the Swedes, are as fond of the theatre as the Parisian French. I found the mate of our steamboat reading "Medea en Opera ;" and all the saw-mill population of Trollhætta were opera-going people. Our accommodations at this good inn were consequently not of the best; and I found, in bed at least, ten thousand good reasons for getting up long before sunrise. I advise the traveller who may visit Trollhætta for its sublime scenery to do the same, and see the Falls amid the morning mists, and before living things are a-stirring.

The enormous chasm through which this great body of water rolls from the Wenner, makes the artificial canal beside it appear a mere scratch on the surface of the earth. A time must have been, however, when this chasm itself was only a scratch on the granite; for all the rocks around and above. it are water-worn, and have been long submerged, apparently under running water. One remarkable place is shown to strangers, because the king and other great personages have inscribed their names in it; but it is much more remarkable, because it could only have been scooped out into such rounded and polished hollows in the hard substance of the primary rock, by the continued action of water in motion over it for a length of time beyond imagination.

When my Swedish friend awoke, we recrossed