"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 Oölitic Silurian Period,
just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was
upward 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."
-- Mark Twain, _Life on the Mississippi_, 1874
[ in Darrell Huff, _How to Lie with Statistics_, 1954.]
