Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 February 1893 — Would Make a Straight River. [ARTICLE]

Would Make a Straight River.

“A Southern Engineer,” in the Engineering Magazine, says that the only solution of the Mississippi River problem, “at once scientific and sensible,” is to give it a straight channel from Cairo to the Gulf, and thinks it a wonder that the “demands of navigation alone have not already compelled this kind of improvement.” He admits that in such a channel that the river would have nearly twice its present velocity, and if he had stopped to think a minute he would have seen that the demands of navigation do not call for any such current. Five miles an hour, which is somewhere near the present rate of the current, is a good strong tide for any ordinary steamboat to stem, and there are many places in the river now where a boat has to hug the shore to make any headway at all, and if the current was increased to ten miles an hour there is not a boat on the river that could get from here to Baton Rouge. Furthermore, with such a current the corroding power of the stream would be enormously increased, and the slightest deflection of the current towards either bank would speedily eat into it and restore the bends which had been gotten rid of. If the channel of the river could be made as straight as a string, an utterly impossible feat, nothing could keep it there but massive dykes of solid masonry reaching to the bottom of the stream on either side, and it is a question how long they would stand. "Southern Engineer’s” solution looks very well on paper, but so far from being either sensible or scientific, it is absurd. —[New Orleans Picayune. * The physicians in Mexico who have been endeavoring to cure typhus fever by administering cooked spiders, have succeeded in killing their patients and at the same time advertising the almost incredibly low degree of civilization prevailing in that country.