# Last edited on 2014-04-24 11:48:03 by stolfilocal
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"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 Oölitic
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."

--Mark Twain, /Life on the Mississippi/, Ch.9