According to the believers in the anti-levee theory, if overflows are prevented, the earth held in suspension, instead of being deposited where it will enrich the land, will gradually sink to the bottom of the river. The result will be that the river-bed will be steadily raised until the surface of the water at ordinary stages will be as high as the present floodmarks. Levees will have to be built higher and higher, the river will be raised far above the adjacent country, and should a break occur at any point, the consequence will be disastrous in the extreme. As an example of the effect of confining a silt-bearing alluvial river to its bed, the Hoang-Ho in China is cited. By constant dyking the bottom of the stream has been raised above large tracts of the adjacent country and some of the most [Illustration: FLOOD IN CHINA.] terrible catastrophes in the history of floods have resulted from a break in the dykes during floods. The natural result of the continual raising of the bottom is that where any serious breach occurs, it is simply impossible to repair it. So the great river has changed its channel entirely several times in the past two thousand years. In 1852 it burst through its banks three hundred and fifty miles from the sea, and cut a new channel through the northern part of the province of Shantung to the Gulf of Pechili, where it emptied nearly two hundred and seventy-five miles north of its former mouth in the Yellow Sea. The sharp angle at which it turned off is noticeable on the maps. This region being almost unknown to foreigners at that time, no one can say how many thousands or millions of lives were destroyed by “China’s Sorrow.” But the greatest disaster of this sort occurred in 1887, when the heavy fall rains of the northwest provinces swelled the streams, and the Yellow River finally broke its banks at a sharp bend in the Ho-nan province, where the town of Cheng Chou is situated. Frantic efforts were made to close the gap, but in vain. It rapidly grew to a width of one thousand two hundred yards. Some distance away the yellow torrent turned into the valley of a small stream known as the Luchia, down which it rushed in an easterly direction, overwhelming everything in its path. “Twenty miles from Cheng Chou it encountered Chungmou, a walled city of the third rank. Its thousands of inhabitants were attending to their usual pursuits. There was no telegraph to warn them, and the first intimation of disaster came with the muddy torrent that rolled down upon them. Within a short time only the tops of the high walls marked where a flourishing city had been. Three hundred villages in the district disappeared utterly, and the lands about three hundred other villages were inundated.