is in a land that is practically tropical.  The volume of its flood is surpassed by the Amazon and, perhaps, the Yukon.  It discharges, however, three times as much water as the Danube, twenty-five times as much as the Rhine, and almost three hundred and fifty times as much as the Thames.  It has several hundred navigable tributaries, and its navigable waters, stretched in a straight line, would reach nearly three-fourths the distance around the earth.  It is one of the most sinuous of rivers.  In one part of its course it flows in a channel nearly 1,400 miles long to accomplish, as the crow flies, the distance of 700 miles.  In more than one place the current forms a loop ten, twenty and even thirty miles around, rather than to cut through a neck perhaps not half a mile in width.  It is one of the most capricious of rivers, for its channel rarely lies in the same place during two successive seasons.  The river manifests a strong inclination to move east; and were La Salle to repeat his memorable voyage, he would touch in scarcely half a score of places the course he formerly traveled; or if he were to go over exactly the same course, he must of necessity have his boats dragged over the ground, for almost the entire course over which he traveled is now dry land.  Since that time the river has deserted almost all of its former channel, as if to repudiate its connection with the after-dinner treaties of two hundred years lang syne; in places its channel lies to the west, but for the greater extent it is to the eastward.[4]

[Footnote 4:  “The bed of the river is so broad that the channel meanders from side to side within the bed, just as the bed itself meanders from bluff to bluff; and, as by erosions and deposits, the river, in long periods of time, traverses the valley, so the channel traverses the bed from bank to bank, justifying the remark often heard, that ’not a square rod of the bed could be pointed out that had not, at some time, been covered by the track of steamboats.’”—­J.H.  SIMPSON, Col.  Eng., Brevet Brig.-Gen., U.S.A.]

PHYSICAL.

The lower Mississippi is among the muddiest streams in the world.  During the average year it brings down 7,500,000,000 cubic yards of sediment, discharging it along the lower course, or pushing it into the Gulf.  As one thinks of the small amount of sediment held in a gallon or two of river water, a comprehension of this vast amount of silt is impossible.  It is enough to cover a square mile in area to a depth of 268 feet.  In five hundred years it would build above the sea level a State as large and as high as Rhode Island.  Thus, by means of this sediment, the river has pushed its mouths fifty miles into the sea, confining its flow within narrow strips of land—­natural levees made by the river itself.