224 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



of surveys and investigations made under the authority of Congress during a pro- 

 tracted period of ten years, embracing everything connected with the river at 

 high and low water, as to levees and embankments, navigation, currents, the 

 bed of the river, its floods, and all phenomena. We assume nothing; we have 

 no theories, no experiments, no hypotheses; simply the fact that water runs down 

 hill, that it is not compressible; these re-inforced as to results by ascertained facts 

 by the most thoroughly applied scientific methods. 



And what is the plan here proposed? Let me state it simply. As now, the 

 river has below New Orleans a current that moves over a bed with a fall of one 

 and one-half inches per mile. The distance is 120 miles. Ten miles below New 

 Orleans the Gulf of Mexico approaches to within five miles of the Mississippi by 

 an arm known as Lake Borgne. The river thus reaches the Gulf level at a 

 point no miles less than now, or in five miles we reach the same level that the 

 river now does in no miles. Gentlemen can discount the drainage capacity of 

 thirteen feet fall in five miles in the one case, and the same fall in no miles as 

 now, in the discharge of these surplus waters. That is all there is to the proposed 

 Lake Borgne outlet. 



Now, the fact to be ascertained is, will it prevent overflow to be restrained 

 or confined by artificial banks ? The plan has been tried, and has failed. By 

 both experience and theory it will require artificial banks to be constructed from 

 four to ten feet high for a thousand miles. Is it practicable as to money cost? 

 and if so, will it hold the water? Both must be answered in the negative. We 

 have found that it is difficult to confine even canal waters by artificial banks. 

 How, then, the mighty floods of the Mississippi ? 



Again, the experience of the ages is that just as you raise the banks of a river 

 you decrease the force of its current, until, as in the case of the river Po, in Italy, 

 the river bed is above the level of adjoining lands. That river, after centuries of 

 leveeing, now runs across the low lands on a ridge. But keeping a river 

 within its natural banks deepens its channel, cutting out its bed to the proper 

 angle of fall to the sea. It requires no science to know this; every washout in 

 the farmer's field illustrates and demonstrates it. The only question of a practi- 

 cal nature in this connection is, can you get outlet enough? I have shown that 



you can. 



•^ ^ ■^ >i« ^ * 



It has been shown by facts, in plain measured feet, that the proposed outlet 

 cannot affect the river channel. Why not make it? It will be observed, Mr. 

 Chairman, that these objections to the outlet are not made as formal engineering 

 ones: they are the mere advocate arguments before the committee: there is an- 

 other one used among members, but carefully kept from the record. This 

 argument is that the outlet would injure the jetties. This is so new and novel 

 that it is done in a whisper. The old soothsayers were said to laugh in each 

 other's faces when alone. The habit did not die with the soothsayers. 



Now, I can speak on this subject without fear of criticism, for from the be- 



