THE LIFE HISTORY OF A RIVER. 



By Erasmus Haworth, University of Kansas, Lawrence. 



Presidential address, delivered before the Kansas Academy of Science, at Topeka, Kan.. 



January 1, 1909. 



T TURING recent times much interest has been manifested in 

 ^-^ river floods and how to prevent damages from the same. This 

 is particularly true in eastern Kansas and southwestern Missouri; 

 a district with an annual rainfall of from forty to forty- five inches; 

 a district with drainage streams which long ago reached the condi- 

 tion of grade or base level, and have since widened their channels 

 to extraordinary widths with the usual meanderings by which the 

 actual lengths of the channels have been increased many fold; a 

 ■district subject to exceedingly irregular precipitation, and one 

 therefore which is liable to have a period of floods at any time in 

 the year or to have none at all. Elsewhere in America a like in- 

 terest is manifested, partly due to increasing damages from floods 

 as a necessary result of increase in population and improvements, 

 but largely due to the general tendency of federal and state govern- 

 ments to look 'into matters of general public interest, and where 

 deemed possible to give aid for a betterment of conditions. 



This last aspect of the subject is modern — scarcely more than a 

 decade old in most states — and, as a result, little has yet been 

 accomplished beyond preliminary investigations and preliminary 

 discussions of methods to be executed later. Practically all the 

 states in the Mississippi valley have taken up the matter in one way 

 or another, so that we now find measures enacted into law on the 

 statute-books of the several states. Such statutes, although varying 

 greatly in detail, are fairly uniform in one respect, namely, the 

 creation by law of certain drainage districts with power to assess 

 taxes on real estate for the purpose of making such improvements 

 as each individual district may deem advisable. The federal gov- 

 ernment likewise has at least two departments — the Department 

 of Agriculture and the United States Geological Survey — each of 

 which is giving attention to the subject and for which limited ap- 

 propriations have been made by the Congress of the United States. 

 In each instance investigations of flood conditions are, in a measure, 

 entwined with those of reclaiming swamp-lands and marshes. 



Up to the present time the United States Geological Survey has 

 done nothing in this line in Kansas. The Agricultural Depart- 



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