United States or Macao ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In the deltas of many large rivers, such as the Po, the Nile, the Ganges, and the Mississippi, buried soils prove subsidences of hundreds of feet; and in several cases, as in the Mississippi delta, the depression seems to be now in progress. Other proofs of the same movement are drowned land forms which are modeled only in open air.
There is no indication of organization, and, although the men of the great deltas were able to indulge in oysters with a freedom which almost makes me regret the advance of civilization and the decay of Whitstable, yet I cannot trace one record of an orderly supper-party. This shows how the heathen in his blindness neglects his natural advantages.
The youthful Prodigal appeared again in the doorway, his ready tears had made miniature deltas over his molasses-begrimed countenance, his lower lip hung down in an impotent despair. 'What's the matter now, Lemuel? 'I want my best shoes, an' a wing on my finger, an' the axe to kill the fatted calf. Would the basket never be empty?
Following one another for a distance of sixty miles, range after range takes thus its header into the deep. The only level spots are the deltas deposited by the streams between the parallels of peak. But these are far between. Most of the way the road belts the cliffs, now near their base, now cut into the precipice hundreds of feet above the tide. The road is one continuous observation point.
Sometimes the river carries this dirt clear out into the sea, and sometimes it piles it up at its mouth so that a delta is formed." "Oh, yes," said Donald, "we studied about that in geography when we had school, but I didn't know a delta was made that way." "Are there any deltas in this part of the river?" asked Susie.
The frequent changes of channel and mouth in the deltas of great rivers are by no means always an effect of diking. The mere accumulation of deposits in the beds of rivers which transport much sediment compels them continually to seek new outlets, and it is only by great effort that art can keep their points of discharge pproximately constant.
Even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?
Hippopotami are found all down this coast in very great numbers, but especially in the deltas of the rivers, or up the streams themselves, and afford an easy, remunerative, and pleasant sport to any man who is not addicted to much hard exercise. The Panjani, Kingani, and Lufiji rivers are full of them, as well as all the other minor feeders to the sea along that coast.
From all of which we see that the Eastern hemisphere's crescent hollow of which, I take it, the Mediterranean, Black, and Caspian Sea depressions are the remains has been gradually filled in, by the elevation of the sea's bottom, and the extension of deltas from the detrital matter brought from the high interior of the continents by the rivers, or by the combined action of the two.
The Alpine streams in far distant days brought down relatively large floods of glacial mud; formed relatively large deltas in the old Lombard bay; filled up with relative rapidity their larger half of the basin.
Word Of The Day