THE Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not acommonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable.

Considering the Missouri its main branch, it is the longestriver in the world--four thousand three hundred miles.

It seems safe to say that it is also the crookedest river in the world,since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three hundredmiles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in sixhundred and seventy-five. It discharges three times as much wateras the St. Lawrence, twenty-five times as much as the Rhine,and three hundred and thirty-eight times as much as the Thames.

No other river has so vast a drainage-basin: it draws its watersupply from twenty-eight States and Territories; from Delaware,on the Atlantic seaboard, and from all the country between that and Idahoon the Pacific slope--a spread of forty-five degrees of longitude.

The Mississippi receives and carries to the Gulf water fromfifty-four subordinate rivers that are navigable by steamboats,and from some hundreds that are navigable by flats and keels.

The area of its drainage-basin is as great as the combined areasof England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany,Austria, Italy, and Turkey; and almost all this wide region is fertile;the Mississippi valley, proper, is exceptionally so.

It is a remarkable river in this: that instead of widening toward its mouth,it grows narrower; grows narrower and deeper. From the junction of the Ohioto a point half way down to the sea, the width averages a mile in high water:

thence to the sea the width steadily diminishes, until, at the 'Passes,' abovethe mouth, it is but little over half a mile. At the junction of the Ohiothe Mississippi's depth is eighty-seven feet; the depth increases gradually,reaching one hundred and twenty-nine just above the mouth.

The difference in rise and fall is also remarkable--not in the upper,but in the lower river. The rise is tolerably uniform down to Natchez(three hundred and sixty miles above the mouth)--about fifty feet.

But at Bayou La Fourche the river rises only twenty-four feet;at New Orleans only fifteen, and just above the mouth only twoand one half.

An article in the New Orleans 'Times-Democrat,' based upon reportsof able engineers, states that the river annually empties four hundredand six million tons of mud into the Gulf of Mexico--which brings to mindCaptain Marryat's rude name for the Mississippi--'the Great Sewer.'

This mud, solidified, would make a mass a mile square and two hundredand forty-one feet high.

The mud deposit gradually extends the land--but only gradually;it has extended it not quite a third of a mile in the two hundredyears which have elapsed since the river took its place in history.

The belief of the scientific people is, that the mouth used to beat Baton Rouge, where the hills cease, and that the two hundredmiles of land between there and the Gulf was built by the river.

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