THE MISSISSIPPI.
W. E. WATT.
AMERICANS like to boast of the things of this country that are larger, longer, more valuable, or more wonderful than anything of the kind in the world. They have recited in school such a number of statements about the Mississippi river that the great stream has become one of the essential points of our nation's honor.
You may be able to make the average man believe that Washington was not always as truthful in his youth as Weems in the cherry-tree story tried to make him; that Captain John Smith drew somewhat on his imagination when some sixteen years after the expedition into the woods he told the story of his rescue by Pocahontas; that perhaps, after all, we did not whip the entire British nation twice in open warfare—but it will be hard to make any native-born American admit that the Mississippi river is not the longest in the world.
He may listen to your argument in favor of the Nile or the Amazon, but he will tell you that he still thinks that if the Mississippi had been measured correctly at first, taking the source of the Missouri as the source of the Mississippi, we would have been the possessors of the longest river on earth.
And if that should seem a trifle weak he will at once tell you that the great river is more wonderful than all others because its source is several hundred feet nearer the center of the earth than its mouth. In other words, the river flows up hill. The curvature of the earth is not the true arc of a circle from the equator to the poles, for the axis of the earth is shorter than its diameter at the equator by about twenty-six miles. It is thirteen miles less from the north pole to the center of the earth than from any point on the equator to the center. So the river flows towards the equator with an apparent fall as estimated from the sea-level, but with an actual rising away from the earth's center just as the sea rises round this shoulder of the earth.
So the Mississippi is a source of joy and boastful conversation to every citizen of the United States.