Now that the season ~has' arrived when from all quarters in China we expect to hear that rivers'have risen and overflowed their banks, carrying ruin on. all sides and with' strict' impartiality in every direction, it is interesting to compare.the situation in China with that in other lands.
Within the. past few. years we hive heard accounts of disastrous floods in nearly every country of Europe, and during the past two months there have been floods in the United States, surpassing in the amount of daniage anything in recent history.
European rivers are more like those of Kuangtung and Fukien, while the rivers of the great: valley. of the Mississippi resemble those of the plain of central and northern China.. When it is recollected that steamboats pass up the Mississippi and the Missouri' over waterways 3,900 miles in Iength—as far as from New York to Constantinople—it is easy to see that when snows melt on the Rockies, aiid great rain-storms sweep- over the vast tracts of the land between those mountains and the Alleghanies, the water accumulated is not to be easily disposed of. In the month of May last, all the: great. tri-butanes of the. Mississippi. sprodd. for miles beyond their usual banks, and the it stream itself was. in some laces " from thirty to forty miles wide. everywhere homes have been swept away, crops destroyed, railroads broken, bridges carried off, labour interrupted." The Arkansas river was a foot higher than the highest water mark of about fifty years ago. The number of lives lost, especially in Sioux city, Iowa, has been very large, and of an unknown total, while the aggregate money loss: has been roughly computed at more than fifty millions of dollars, one-fifth of which is assigned to St.-Louis and its neighbourhood. We-all*have an. impression that in this~'inventive and mechanical age, there is little or nothing that is impossible for man to accomplish, if indeed we are not convinced that almost everything has already been ace. complished. It is therefore very depressing to hear, that the vast injury' to commerce and to agriculture, of floods like those to which we' have referred;: are forcing attention anew: to: the-engineering problem of dealing: with the "Father of Waters.' "So: far; though enormous sums of money have. been spent by the general government and: -by the States on the river's banks; of lasting value has been "accomplished. The levees-protect the banks,- but the bottom of the river the" jetties "scour" the bottom,. but "accumulate mud-banks about' their: own: mouths, and in time become useless; the: outlet theory and the-reservoir theory have been. abandoned as impracticable... The problem is still not -merely one of: exe Bloom' pense,-but-of method "The evils com-plaited' of are'several; and unfortunately, what: helps-in one -place, is: apt to da
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