626 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



sections of the country. In the decades immediately succeeding 

 1820 the New York canal system gave many portions of the 

 State advantages not possessed in equal degree, if at all, by any 

 other equally productive and extensive section of the then settled 

 area of the land. The development of the railroad system of the 

 country has made the canals of far less relative importance to-day 

 than they were sixty years ago. The lessened value of its excep- 

 tional transportation facilities and its consequent nearness to the 

 ocean and the world beyond, might be thought to explain the de- 

 crease of population of rural New York, were it not that regions 

 which never enjoyed those facilities, which are a thousand miles 

 from the Eastern seaboard, and which were not thoroughly set- 

 tled until after the railroad system had reached a considerable 

 stage of development, show a similar decrease. The nine south- 

 eastern counties of Minnesota cover an area of 5,682 square miles— 

 that is, they are together about one sixth larger than Connecticut. 

 Only forty years ago they were an unsettled wilderness, and yet 

 every one of the nine has fewer rural inhabitants than it had ten 

 years ago. Outside of the cities and towns these counties had, in 

 1880, 149,622 inhabitants, and in 1890 but 138,259, a decrease of 

 11,363, or at the rate of 7*60 per cent, a ratio of decrease but slightly 

 less than in rural New York. This decrease becomes doubly sig- 

 nificant in the light of the fact that a similar loss has taken place 

 over a very wide area of which this corner of Minnesota forms 

 only the northwestern extremity. From the time a traveler down 

 the Mississippi leaves St. Paul until he reaches a point more than 

 fifty miles south of St. Louis, or during the journey between 

 places which are over five hundred miles from each other in an air 

 line, and very much farther following the bends of the river, 

 there will only be once, and that while traveling less than twenty 

 miles, when either on one bank of the river or the other, and 

 usually on both, he will not be passing counties which had less 

 rural population according to the eleventh census than were cred- 

 ited to them by the tenth. The distance back from the river to 

 which this area of decrease extends ranges at different points all 

 the way from twenty miles or less to more than two hundred. 

 If the counties which had less rural population in 1890 than in 

 1S80 be distinctly colored upon a map, it will appear that the 

 Mississippi, from the thirty-eighth to the forty-fifth parallel, is 

 the center of a very large tract composed entirely of such coun- 

 ties. This tract, while very irregular in outline, is composed en- 

 tirely of contiguous counties, as the word contiguous at all events 

 is practically construed by the modern disciples of Elbridge 

 Gerry. It extends over portions of the five States of Minnesota, 

 Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, and Wisconsin. It has an area of 81,020 

 square miles, or nearly a third more than that of all the New Eng- 



