OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 229 



Professor Lovering asked the attention of the Academy to 

 a discussion which seems to have been going on as early as 

 1843, and which had been recalled to his notice by a letter 

 which he had recently received from a friend in Cincinnati, 

 who questioned the propriety of including among the ques- 

 tions for the examination of candidates for the High School 

 of that city the following : — " Does the Mississippi River run 

 up hill or down hill ? " 



" I shall introduce what I have to say upon the subject with an 

 extract from the Common School Journal.* The article from which 

 I make the extract is headed ' Geographical Error.' The writer 

 says : — 



" ' The following egregious blunder, with the captivating title 

 ' Water running up Hill,^ is going the round of the public papers, to 

 be caught up by thousands of school-teachers, and imprinted upon the 

 minds of tens of thousands of scholars. Dr. Smith, in a recent lecture 

 on Geology, in New York, mentioned a curious circumstance connected 

 loith the Mississippi River. It runs from north to south, and its 

 mouth is actually four miles higher than its source : a result due to 

 the centrifugal motion of the earth. Thirteen miles is the difference 

 between the equatorial and polar radius ; and the river, in two thou- 

 sand miles, has to rise one third of this distance, it being the height 

 of the equator above the pole. If this centrifugal force loere not con- 

 tinued, the rivers would Jloio back, and the ocean loould overflow the 

 land.'' 



" This statement of Dr. Smith, when separated from the paradox- 

 ical declai'ation with which the newspapers have heralded it, is wholly 

 correct, except in the numerical details, in which Dr. Smith evidently 

 did not aim at great precision. But the writer in the Journal (who 

 is understood to be President Horace Mann) not only attacks the ac- 

 curacy of these details, but assails the mechanical principlewhich lies 

 at the foundation of Dr. Smith's statement ; saying, that ' it would be 

 difficult to compact a greater number of errors of fact and of princi- 

 ple into one short paragraph, than are found in the above quotation,' 

 The precise numbers involved in this question are of secondary impor- 

 tance. I am willing, and Dr. Smith no doubt is willing, that Mr. Mann 



* Vol. V. p.G5. 



