In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the
Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles.
That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore,
any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old
Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower
Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles
long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by
the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years
from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters
long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together,
and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board
of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such
wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
- Life on the Mississippi |
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