One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. There is something fascinating about science. (Summary from Wikipedia) For further information, including links to online text, reader information, RSS feeds, CD cover or other formats (if available), please go to the LibriVox catalog page for. 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. Life on the Mississippi is a memoir by Mark Twain detailing his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War. 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. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. what an opportunity is here! Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue from!. Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and “let on” to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past. Twain uses epithets to describe it, such as graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it every passing moment with new marvels of coloring. Its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at present. Mark Twain starts off his piece with the description of the Mississippi river. The Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago. Although the shortening of the Mississippi River he referred to was the result of engineering projects eliminating many of the bends in the river, it is a thought-provoking spoof: “A humorous treatment of the rigid uniformitarian view came from Mark Twain.

Mark twain mississippi