Mississippi. These European rivers present far smaller volumes of floodflow, far smaller flood-heights, and their beds are mostly through relatively narrow valleys, over beds composed of glacial drift, which is far less subject to erosion than the deep, soft, alluvial deposits through which the Mississippi and its main tributaries wind their devious, uncertain way. The sediments of the European rivers comprise coarse gravels and sand-grains of far greater size than the almost impalpable mass of which the Mississippi River sediment is mostly composed. Therefore, while much can be learned from the successes and failures of European practice, and from the laws of sedimentation, transportation, and scour developed in European laboratories, much original scientific investigation must be carried on here to reasonably cover these different American conditions. The Mississippi, for the lower 500 miles of its course, flows through a broad delta more than 100 miles wide at Greenville and over 40 miles wide at Vicksburg, over sedimentary deposits of depths largely unknown. Probably there is nowhere less than 200 feet of soft silt, mud, or clay beneath the channel bed, with here and there irregular deposits of gravel. Conditions of transportation and deposit of silt, sand, and gravel in any one particular locality has varied in the course of many thousands of years while the river has shifted its channel back and forth across the delta. In general, the sand grains in the bed of the river below Cairo are seldom so large as the one-hundredth part of an inch in diameter. More often they are only one one-thousandth of an inch, and are interspersed with a variable amount of colloidal matter of still finer grain which, to some extent, binds the whole mass together so as to resist erosion. Gravels, mostly of small sizes, have been rolled in, along beds of tributaries chiefly at flood time, and sorted out by the current from caving banks, so that they form a small but extremely important percentage of the whole mass; because it is these gravels, along with the coarser sand-grains that, rolling along in the course of ages, have become concentrated and gathered together so as to form the bars at the cross-overs between the bends, which gravel-bars resist deepcutting by the flood currents, and form submerged, slowly shifting dams between the deep pools in the river bends. The strange fact is well proved that one of the first acts of a Mississippi flood is to gather up or roll along the scattered pebbles from the pools by the quickened flood velocity and drop them on the cross-over bars, where in flood time the velocity of water is less because of their greater width at the flood level, thereby increasing the height of the flood by a foot or more. The height of surface corresponding to a stated flow in cubic feet per second is higher after a flood than before. Subsequently the gravel on the crest of the bar is slowly moved down-river into the next pool, and the bars very slowly travel downstream. The soil physics of the river-bed, and its constitution, are yet largely unknown, but these unknown factors may hold the key to possibilities of most profound changes in future methods of controlling the shape and course of the main river channel. This subject of the sediments, their physics, geologic or physiographic origin, their cementation, erosion, and behavior against currents of various velocities, alone might keep a large hydraulic laboratory and its attendant field party busy for five or ten years, and finally produce results of incalculable value. This study of sediments should apply also to the lower reaches of the great tributaries, the Missouri, Arkansas, St. Francis, the Yazoo, the Tensas, the White, the Black, and the Red River, and to the Atchafalaya. A Far Greater Ancient River F OR hundreds of miles along the upper reaches of the Mississippi above St. Louis, the high bluffs on both sides of the river, varying from two miles to five miles apart, give evidence of an ancient river in pre-glacial times that was far more magnificent in width, depth, and volume, than the present river; which as it shrunk in volume during the disappearance of the northern continental ice cap, and subsequent to the diversion to the eastward of the waters that now form the St. Lawrence, refilled its ancient bed with sediments to the depth of about 200 feet and shrunk in width so as to occupy only a fraction of its ancient channel. Perhaps the gravels which are now found in caving banks and in cross-over bars were transported to their present locality, in part, by the more powerful current of this ancient river. Study of the origin of the particles that form these gravel bars by competent geologists would be of much interest, and might be one of the many aids in establishing better future methods of regulation. At Keokuk, Iowa, fortunately for power development, ancient glaciers from the northwest pushed the location of the modern river to the eastward, over ledges at a higher level which in due course produced the present rapids and provided the excellent foundation for lock and power development; but for all of the remaining distance downstream to the Gulf of Mexico, so far as known, there lies beneath the river-bed 200 feet or more in depth of sediment, mostly fine and soft, interspersed here and there with lenses of gravel, except for a space near Commerce, Missouri. The main river and its lower tributaries all flow mainly over unstable material, and have meandered through countless ages back and forth across the delta, leaving old bayous and old concentrations of sand and gravel into pervious beds, so that foundations for levees vary greatly in stability and imperviousness. Nevertheless it is on these uncertain foundations that levees must be built, and in many places they must of necessity be built out of material that the engineer would reject as unsuitable for an earth dam. Thought is thus forced to the possibility (probably beyond reach but nevertheless worthy of consideration) of training the river to dig itself deeper into its soft, deep bed, so that future flood-levels would come below the level of the broad bottom-lands, over which the floods do their damage. The Mississippi is the crookedest great river in the world. It travels 868 miles from St. Louis to Natchez in covering a distance of 515 miles in a straight line. In many reaches of a hundred miles the length could be cut nearly in half. The lessened friction on a straight course would save nearly half of the actual drop of 379 feet between St. Louis and New Orleans. If one could straighten the river and hold it to a straight course, over only portions of its length, it is thus plain there would be plenty of vertical space available within which to lower both the river-bed and its flood-plain safely below the adjacent bottom-land, all the way from Vicksburg to Keokuk. On the other hand, all engineers experienced in river control have been taught to fear a cut-off across a river bend or "ox-bow" as second in danger only to a great flood crevasse, because of the under-cutting and caving at river bends which follows and may extend twenty miles more up the river by reason of the quickened current. In a state of nature erosion is continually going on near the foot of the steep slope at the concave shore of each great river bend. The loop thus tends to become longer, and as length increases the resistance to flow increases, and finally natural forces attempt to shorten the distance by a short-cut across the narrowing neck of land left between one loop and the next down-stream in time of flood. It has long been the settled policy of the engineers-in-charge to prevent these cut-offs and to hold the river always to its present curved channel, by building protective coverings of willow mattresses over the places where erosion is most active. The swift current, the great depth, the steepness of the submerged bank all make this a highly difficult and expensive operation, but one in which great technical skill has been developed. The weaving of a durable mattress is not only slow and costly but requires such quantities of willow trees that the supply becomes exhausted if more than a limited length is built in one year. We have not space here to explain the foundations for a belief that by longcontinued, patient investigation in field and laboratory, methods could be devised within reasonable limits of cost, by which after a time the river could be straightened and subsequently held to a straightened course, this under-cutting and caving of banks prevented, and the flood-plain lowered so that future floods would hold no terrors for the farmers who have been enticed to settle down on these ten million acres by the fertility of the land and the supposed safety of the levees. The Function of the Hydraulic E UROPEAN river and harbor engineers now are taking many of their problems of river and harbor improvement into the laboratory and being guided by experiments on small-scale models under mathematical theory pointed out by Sir Isaac Newton, but only developed and applied extensively during the past twenty or forty years. Our American problems are largely different, but even those of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers can be studied in the laboratory with great advantage. Some of our American engineers who have scoffed at using this method with such a giant river apparently fail to grasp that the fundamental idea is not to make a little-scale model of the river in a long box and watch it perform while prodded or tickled in spots until perhaps one of the later stages of the proceedings. The idea is to take separate elements or factors of the great problem each by itself into the laboratory, discover the laws of sedimentation, of scour, of producing vortex motion by opposing currents, and thereby doubling the scouring velocity, etc. The writer believes that such a laboratory in competent hands could save the people of the United States more than a million dollars per year. Levee Heights and the Rising THE 'HE recent increase in flood-heights. does not prove that the river-bed is rising, as was predicted by opponents of the levee plan. The best data available from soundings shows no important change in elevation of the river-bed. The Commission's profile for levee bars, five, ten, or twenty miles apart. with deep pools between. The average depth from Natchez to St. Louis has been said to be over thirty feet, while the natural depth over the bars at low water is only five or six feet save where channels nine feet deep are cut through by the Government dredges. Questions of Policy T true that the present wide-spread height has wisely been an increasing is one, in the interests of economy. Ob- We have as yet insufficient scientific One of the greatest factors in deepening the channel over the bars would be the stopping the feeding-in of the fresh supplies of gravel that come from the caving banks-probably the finergrained material is largely carried onward to the sea, while the gravel and coarser sands are in part carried along near the bottom until they join other deposits of like nature at the cross-over bar. It is not generally known that for perhaps ninety-five per cent of its course the Mississippi is deep enough to take large ocean steamers up to St. Louis, and that the obstacles to navigation and to flow are largely on the narrow cross-over I truction and suffering is the result largely of planters having been induced by prospective valuable crops from the rich and wonderfully fertile soil to purchase, clear off thickets of trees and canebrake, and cultivate lands in the river bottom which, until relatively a few years ago, were submerged in every great flood and correspondingly cheap. Until within a few years past these lands were farmed in the full expectation of occasional flooding, while precautions were taken for the retreat of families and domestic animals to the higher ground during the flood season. It would be of interest to trace the development of the present idea that all of these vast areas should look so largely to the Federal Treasury for their safety; particularly since these bottom-lands are understood to have been ceded by the Federal Government to the several States in consideration of the State (or its legal subdivision) undertaking to bear the cost of reclaiming them. There have been great speculations and appreciations in value of land, increases from less than five dollars per acre to as much as fifty dollars per acre having followed the nearcompletion of the levee system, the cost of which has been in part assessed back on the lands, but not wholly so. The early levees were built solely at the expense of the planters; later levee districts were formed under authority of the States, with power to assess lands benefited, and later the Federal Government was called in, apparently on the theory that building levees would be an aid to navigation. The present Federal aid to reclamation of flooded land became established as a settled policy of the Government only eleven years ago. The Mississippi River Commission was not organized until 1879, and first of all, surveys had to be made of nearly 2,000 miles of river banks. Then followed many costly experiments on methods of channel control. There were long debates in Congress as to whether it was within Constitutional power of the Federal Government to assist in building levees. This was not settled until the Flood Control Act of 1916, which authorized the Commission to build levees upon the receipt of not less than one-third the cost involved from the levee districts concerned. It was not until the Act of 1923 that this authority was extended to the tributaries of the main stream which were affected by its flood-waters. Also it would be interesting to trace the history of the change in interest of the Federal Government from control and improvement of the river for purposes of navigation, formerly its sole interest, to that of taking so costly a share in this vast project of safeguarding about 18,000,000 acres of farm lands; and to recent proposals that it A expend vastly larger sums, chiefly for Regardless of the causes by which this Driftwood from the Deluge Special Correspondence from New Orleans, by DIXON MERRITT FLAT-BOTTOMED boat with an out-board motor chugged into the sodden levee bank at Melville, just above the first big break in the Atchafalaya system. It was loaded with Negroes, picked up from hummocks and housetops out there in the level plantation lands which now, but for the tree tops, looked a yellow sea. Among them was a girl, very small, very black, very tired. She was six by her face, four by her figure. Her home had gone in the night. It was now noon of the second succeeding day. They told me that she had not eaten. A Coast Guard boat took her, with the others, across the Atchafalaya to the side then not flooded. With others who had come out of the flood by other flatbottomed boats, she sat all that long afternoon on the boards of the station platform, waiting for a train. A CROSS the current of the river, made perilously swift by the suction of the great crevasse, a skiff came, darting and dancing. Plying its oars was a lank Louisianian of the old French stock. He had in the bottom of the skiff a quantity of grocer's sundries. He said that they were given to him for the refugees by a merchant on the other side whose stock was doomed by the flood. A giant Italian, swart and tall, keeper of a stand, came running up the levee. He shook his fist at the boatman and shouted, "You steala da stuff." The boatman called him the sort of liar that requires a string of adjectives, French and English. The Italian flashed a knife. The boatman's left fist lashed out, and the Italian was flat on the levee crown. Twice he staggered up, still clutching the knife, and twice more he went down before the lashing left. Constables led both men away, and the skiff rocked to a berth against a piece of bayous, drain the swamps. And that's The train backed in. The refugees climbed silently aboard, slowly, too tired to stampede. I WENT by motor back to Baton But, I thought, as I walked away toward the Negro camp, what does a "Cajun" know about engineering? (One is quickly Romanized in Rome.) T Rouge, where flood headquarters Ar the Negro camp, a new consign were, and ate a leisurely dinner. Then An Acadian farmer, temporarily a "I got good land in the Big Bend," he said. "It make me sorry to-day to see on these hills the little strawberry plants so little, so weak, so not bear many berries. Mine-big-more look like Irish potato plants. "But they-the water turns them yellow now. It come, that water, straight like a wall. It leap like a panther. I run, no wait to get my coat, one baby on this arm, one baby pull by this hand. My wife, too, and babies bigger-six we got. We run for the levee top. My horses, yes, they save but that, my friend, because they follow me like dogs. I had them in the yard. They climb up on the levee, too, and then that water leap on all the rest. "And all for why, my friend? For why they never stop to think that there's Almighty God in Heaven. He make these bayous, yes, these swamp what take the water away and soak it up when first my grandpère came. Bayous, they'll take the water away when my littlest baby's babies have their hair as white like sheep. There's God in Heaven what make this river. But them-they no know that. They shut off all the ment of refugees was coming in. The doctor was looking them over. As soon as they were fed, he would immunize them, though it was ten o'clock at night. "Come on into the kitchen," said one of the assistant superintendents to me. And the refugees filed in. Slowly, wearily, they passed men at the cooking vessels who filled their paper plates. One man, ladle in hand, stood by a big milk can. And there came to him that little girl, very black, and very tired, whose home by the sugar-cane fields had been overwhelmed by the flood at about this time two nights before. She held up her paper cup. She was not experienced in handling paper cups. She squeezed the top and nearly all the milk was spilled. Slowly she drained the few remaining drops. "There's more for you," said the assistant superintendent. And she waited without a word while a dozen others received their milk. Slowly she held up her cup and, when it was filled, drained it slowly, very slowly. She was very little and very tired. She might have had a cookie back by the banks of the Atchafalaya if men's passions had not broken bounds. And there are the figures in the picture: the Negroes, big and little; the American descendants of the original French settlers; about as many American descendants of original English settlers in other parts of the United States; the Acadians who are still in many respects a people apart; the merchants who serve all of these and make up the towns and cities. T HERE is one other figure-either the big, dominating figure or else not worth considering at all. He is the big planter. Throughout large areas of the overflowed country there are only the planters and the Negroes and, here and there, a merchant of sorts. Over other large areas there are only the French and Acadian and other small farmers; no big planters, few Negroes. When the floods come they are all equal, all to be rescued, all to be cared for, all to be rehabilitated, all to be saved ultimately from the danger of recurring floods. The figures that came into the picture on the crest of the recent flood are more numerous and even, if possible, more varied. F IRST, there was the Secretary of Commerce, co-ordinating relief activities, thinking ahead toward rehabilitation, still further ahead to permanent flood prevention. First, in another sense, there was the Red Cross, everywhere, doing something of everything. There was the Mississippi River Commission, with scientific groups studying the discharge at various points, gathering data as to just what was happening, wedded to levees alone but willing, at last, to think of something else. There were the State Boards of Engineers, doing much the same things, but more thoroughly convinced that new methods must be found. There were the Boards of the numerous Levee Districts, topping levees, fighting heroically at desperately weak places, spending without stint the levee tax money taken from every acre of land, every mile of railroad, every dollar's worth of property, every hogshead of sugar, every barrel of rice, every sack of potatoes, even from every can of oysters. There was the National Guard of the overflowed States-thousands of men patrolling levees, policing refugee camps, evacuating threatened areas, enforcing discipline and sanitation, guarding property. There was the American Legion, lending a hand wherever possible. There were committees of bankers' organizations, strengthening the hands of all the others. There were local committees in all the communities, doing what could be done. for their own people and for the refugees encamped upon them. There was the United States Coast Guard, with cutters, with life-boats assembled from both oceans, the Gulf and the Lakes, under the command of engineer officers of the Army. There was the United States Weather Bureau, measuring the flood, calculating its advance, sending out warnings in time, always hoping that they would be heeded. There was the State Conservation Department, feeding birds and game animals, trying to prevent extermination of the deer and other wild things. There were the State Health Departments and local societies of doctors, vaccinating, inoculating, analyzing, looking after sanitation, trying to hold at the minimum smallpox, typhoid, infantile paralysis. There were the State Departments of Agriculture, the State Universities, agencies of the Federal Department of Agriculture, doing what could be done for live stock, looking ahead to a supply of seeds for replanting when the waters should subside. There were the State Highway Departments, with all their equipment on levees or in the areas that must be evacuated. There were the Army and Navy air services, searching the woods and the waters for maroons, observing the condition of the levees, flying low enough at times to read names on railroad stations, high enough at other times to see the full sweep of the waters, red, yellow, and black, from as many streams, creeping down, separate and side by side, to the Gulf. There were business and industrial concerns, the telephone company, the oil companies, various others, putting all their facilities at the disposal of those men who acted as temporary dictators in the flooded States. If the flood broke all records in volume of water and in duration, the rescue work broke all records, too, in amount of money spent, in almost perfect co-ordination of rescue work, in prompt and effective plans for rehabilitation. A ND all of this was done for the sake of the little Negro, black and tired; of the Acadian whose strawberry vines would have grown so big if only the water had not withered them; of the merchant ready to give his stock away when the water bore down; of-yes, of the big planter. All of this and more must be done again and yet again-unless we are ready to take one or the other of two heroic courses. We may abandon the overflow area of the Lower Mississippi Valley to its fate -which would not be an evil entirely unmixed with good. We may make the Valley safe from floods which would be a long and difficult and extremely expensive job. One or the other of these things must be done by the Nation. The Valley cannot protect itself. The volume of water from half of the area of the Nation is too great. And the Nation cannot longer bear the disgrace of recurring conditions such as now exist in that Valley. Before deciding which of the two things is to be done or if a compromise between the two is possible-we ought to try to see just what that Valley is. NE thing we may be sure of. It has a soil more fertile than any other in the United States, probably more fertile than any other in the world. And this the Lower Valley owes to those same flood waters that sweep down upon it from the rest of the country. They have brought down, through centuries, and centuries of centuries, the cream of the soil of nearly half the territory which composes the United States. The fertility that is brought down now-except in cases of overflow-is washed out to the Gulf of Mexico, but that which was brought down long ago made the delta lands. That fact is to be thought of when we say that the Mississippi is not the Lower Valley's river. If it brings them, at times, desolation, it has brought them through the ages opulence --and arrogance of soil. They boast, those people of the Lower Valley, that they could produce enough to feed and clothe the entire population of the United States. And they do not exaggerate. All in cultivation and all cultivated properly, the land subject to overflow could do just that. BU UT it happens that the Nation is not, just now, in need of anything of that kind. Our surplus of foodstuffs and raw materials for fabrics has been our greatest embarrassment these latter years. The agriculture of the Nation as a whole would be more prosperous if the overflow area of the Lower Mississippi Valley were taken completely out of production, abandoned to the flood, permitted to revert to swamp and forest. We might feel the shortage of sugar and rice-possibly. We would feel no shortage of the numerous other things that the Delta produces so abaundantly. But, if we could reconcile ourselves to the heartlessness of such a proposal, it would not work. Excepting certain of the large planters who are there for money, the people who are in that area will stay there, floods or no floods. I have seen, in my time, much devotion to home-foolish devotion, much of it. I, myself, have cherished a few old foundation stones of a pioneer's chimney. I have thought that mountaineers are devoted beyond the race of men to their homes, their cabins on the slopes, and their sparse acres in the coves. But never elsewhere have I seen manifested such love for home as radiated from the wrung hearts of the small farmers of Louisiana. I have seen them, with their wives and children, sitting without shelter from sun and rain on a bit of levee. I have heard I The Book Table Edited by EDMUND PEARSON Drama Inventories By MONTROSE J. Moses T took a long while to waken us to a consciousness of our drama past; for years we were willing to assume that we had one, and to allow the records to become so thickly covered with dust that they were almost hidden from us. There is no department of human activity where evidences of accomplishment are more quickly lost and confused than in the theater; papers have a way of crumbling, programs lose their crispness, actors (who, in their lifetime are weak on dates, especially as they pertain to their birth!) lose somewhat their identity. There is no one about whom we know so much and so little as Shakespeare. In a stretch of one hundred and fifty years, ways and methods may be as completely annihilated as was Pompeii. So there is nothing left for the student but to unearth the ground plan, fill in the details, and then soar high and view the panorama in its general flow of recreated life. Such writing has its arduous aspects, for the spirit becomes weakened in proportion to the accumulation of the notes one has to make. As the French philosopher said: "If you are not careful you will find what you are looking for." The zest of the hunter is the great salvation of the research worker; he raises his structure, fact by fact, and then from the topmost tower he looks at his findings from the angle of his greatest interest. The bare physical task of recording the eleven hundred pages of the first two volumes of Dr. Odell's "Annals of the New York Stage" represents a brave adventure, since dates and names are not easy to file for ready reference, nor 1 Annals of the New York Stage. By George C. D. Odell. Two volumes issued: Vol. 1 [to 1798]; Vol. 2 [1798-1821]. Columbia University Press, New York. $8.75 each. do they jump into proper sequence without discipline. We have had many surveys of the American theater, and in particular of the theater of New York, but never before have performances been so accurately noted, never before have the old papers from colonial days been so systematically perused for every shred of theatrical history, as in the case of this work, which when completed bids fair to number eight volumes. The ancient sage looking for an honest man was never more assiduous than has been Dr. Odell in tracing our drama beginnings from the days of Cortéz. His temperamental approach is to be noted from the very first; he never wearies as he trudges the by-lanes of amusement endeavor, and he does not leave neglected the by-products of the theater, such as concerts, summer gardens, circuses, freaks, and dancing. The compact pages of these sumptuous books are shaped by a loving hand, which means that Dr. Odell, the investigator, has turned dry facts into graceful phrasings; has quoted so copiously from contemporaneous opinion, has concentrated upon an actor so much of the social flavor of the time, that the romance of the playhouse sounds uppermost in his record. Futile it would be to attempt to appraise such a huge undertaking, to note in small space the multifarious veins of richness he has uncovered. Historical workers in American Revolutionary fields have now unearthed regimental buttons representing nearly every British and American contingent of soldiery; Professor Odell has similarly recorded, and excellently, the Continental and Red Coat actors, and should be content to let the matter rest where he leaves it. But such ardor as he displays is not easily appeased he holds tenaciously to the different strands of his narrative; he apostrophizes his good fortune and utters threnodies over elusive evidences. If research work can preserve this enthusiasm the results are refreshing. 2 At the University of London there is a learned student who can hold hands across seas with the Professor from Columbia University. Dr. Allardyce Nicoll has just completed his third volume which gives a sweeping, charted view of English drama from 1660 to 1800. Here is a logarithmic examination of the records, with handlists that remind one of railroad guides, starred and abbreviated and raised to the second power. One in the future will not be able to solve the problems of Restoration productions or of Eighteenth Century playwriting without a checking up of facts and editions and ways and means with the findings of Dr. Nicoll. He possesses that type of mind which might be called "artistically legal;" he piles up the evidence, he quotes the cases, he shows the profound traceries of precedence and innovation, and he designates with quick but ripe judgment. Such is his method for all of his books; the pattern for each is the same. But he possesses. Dr. Odell's unquenchable enthusiasm; he can. above his accumulated notes and, like the aviator photographing from the heights, he can indicate succinctly the qualities of his period, its limitations, its changes toward modern conditions which typify the present theater. He confesses in his new book that the theater product is not brilliant, but such a research worker can not only draw sermons from stones but create a rock garden in bloom. There is no period so dull that an actor's life will not give it color; there is no play so dead that its production, according to the theater conven 2 A History of Late Eighteenth Century Drama: 1750 to 1800. By Allardyce Nicoll. University Press, Cambridge, England. 16s. net. |