Please observe:-- 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.
When the water begins to flow through one of those ditches I have been speaking of, it is time for the people thereabouts to move.