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. Its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at present. 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.
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