much less rate, tow a vastly greater cargo than the river steamer. That discovery was the knell of the old-time steamboat, and the beginning of a new era of navigation. Powerful as the railway may be, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that a tug and train of barges will carry a cargo of merchandise from St. Paul to St. Louis for one-tenth the sum the consignee must pay for railway transportation. So, to-day, the river is just as important as a highway of commerce as it was in the palmy days of the floating palace and river greyhound. Railway traffic has enormously increased, but river traffic along the most wonderful of streams has not materially lessened. The Mississippi is certainly a wonderful river. From Elk Lake to the Gulf of Mexico it has a variable length of about 2,800 miles; from Pass a l'Outre to the head of the Missouri its extent is nearly 4,200 miles--a length not equaled by any other river in the world. It is evident, by a moment of reflection, that a river which traverses a great extent of latitude offers much greater facilities for commerce and settlement than a longitudinal river. The Mississippi traverses a greater breadth of latitude than any other river, except the Nile, for its sources are in regions of almost arctic cold, while its delta is in a land that is practically tropical. The volume of its flood is surpassed by the Amazon and, perhaps, the Yukon. It discharges, however, three times as much water as the Danube, twenty-five times as much as the Rhine, and almost three hundred and fifty times as much as the Thames. It has several hundred navigable tributaries, and its navigable waters, stretched in a straight line, would reach nearly three-fourths the distance around the earth. It is one of the most sinuous of rivers. In one part of its course it flows in a channel nearly 1,400 miles long to accomplish, as the crow flies, the distance of 700 miles. In more than one place the current forms a loop ten, twenty and even thirty miles around, rather than to cut through a neck perhaps not half a mile in width. It is one of the most capricious of rivers, for its channel rarely lies in the same place during two successive seasons. The river manifests a strong inclination to move east; and were La Salle to repeat his memorable voyage, he would touch in scarcely half a score of places the course he formerly traveled; or if he were to go over exactly the same course, he must of necessity have his boats dragged over the ground, for almost the entire course over which he traveled is now dry land. Since that time the river has deserted almost all of its former channel, as if to repudiate its connection with the after-dinner treaties of two hundred years lang syne; in places its channel lies to the west, but for the greater extent it is to the eastward.[4]