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Mark Twains' Caution on Extrapolation: In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the
Lower Mississippi has
shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle
over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind
or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million
years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million
three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a
fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that
seven hundred and
forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and
three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets
together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual
board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such
wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. |
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