The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-04-30

deposits close to their banks, and have thus gradually built troughs on each sida of them It is in these vast troughs sissippi carries more stuff into them at every flood. It comes down loaded with the richest materials of the uplands and the mountains. and drops a great part of it there. From the state of Missouri alone, 1t is estimated. enough soil to make shaft one mile square and higher than that of the Washington monument is annually dropped into the Mississippi. Within this same period the Missouri car- ries down a pile of equal. area which is 400 feet high, and this Is mixed with billions of tons of rich mud taken from the states of Indiana, Illinois and Iowa. This work has been going on throughout the ages. and the earth washings are now increased by bad cultivation. They are carrying away the best elements of our soil, and much of these are stored contain the richest fertilizing materials on earth. They are full of the stuff for which our farmers give their hard dollars to the chemical companies They are loaded with phosphates and lime, the latter coming largely from the shells Of minute crustaceans, including crabI and crawf1sh, which live in the swamps, and. dying, leave their shells there in such quantities that they have permeated the mud with phosphate of lime. This rich stuff is found in all of the swamps and there are great quanties of it in the delta of the Mississippi
 In the Delta
 And what a mighty delta the Missis- sippi has! It Is one of the greatest on earth. You could lose that of the Nile within it and it's lands would make a second Egypt It is bigger than the delta of the Ganges It Is many miles wide and is as long as from New York to Cleveland. The swamps in it com prise altogether over 2O,00O,0O0 acres, and they are so rich that any 40 acres would make a good farm. The lower part of the delta has millions of acres which will raise sugar and rice: North of them are millions that could be de- voted to cotton, and still farther north are millions fitted for corn. We all know what Holland has done by diking the sand hills of the North sea. This ioHu pc QiktQ the same way, Dut it would be walling in hot beds, rather than sand.
 The government geogra phers have al ready made topographic maps of a great part of the lower Mississippi They have gone over the swamps on foot, on horseback and in boats, and have charted it section by section. I have before me, as I write, one of their maps which covers an area perhaps the size of a township in a levee district of the state of Louisiana It Is about the size of mans pocket handkerchief and 1t is peppered with figures, each one of which shows the height of land or depth of water on the spot which 1t marks. It gives every stream, and the character of every hill and hollow. The bayous are drawn to a scale, and the whole marshy district is shown in such way that civil engineer could make working plans for it's drainage. It Is this sort of work that Is being done throughout the Mississippi delta to fit 1t for private drainage enter prises, or for the time when the states or the national government may adopt some plan to reclaim the lands.
 A Job For Uncle Sam
 |s And just. here I would say that the draining of the swamp lands of the