authority, the general lines that the necessary remedies must take.

The river problems in the great central valleys present certain
difficulties which engineers have been unable to overcome. If levees are
constructed, it is found that the bed of the stream rises also, so that
the situation is not materially changed. If channels are deepened, the
fury of the floods is increased. If the construction of reservoirs is
proposed, there are very important questions of location and danger.

UTILIZING NATURAL RESERVOIRS

In many places the Mississippi River, closely diked, flows high above
the lands adjacent. Even at New Orleans, 107 miles from the Gulf, it is
during high water ten to fifteen feet above the level of the city.
Obviously the levee system, while useful everywhere and in some
localities adequate, is not a universal remedy. Reservoirs properly
constructed should be of service in storing the waters of many such
rivers as those that have caused the havoc in Ohio and Indiana, but to
meet the requirements they would have to be of enormous size, very
numerous and costly, as Professor Willis S. Moore, chief of the Weather
Bureau, points out.

Nature itself has provided in lowlands throughout all of these valleys
receptacles which, before men came, took up the surplus waters. We have
reclaimed millions of acres of these lands on the theory that we could
confine the rivers which once overflowed them, but thus far we have
failed to establish the theory.

It is probable that any successful national work for the control of
rivers will have to start with the idea of utilizing some of these
natural reservoirs. The lands would not be habitable of course, but for
agriculture they would be enriched instead of, as now, devastated. To
depopulate some such tracts would not be as costly or as terrible as to
leave them to the sweep of irresistible torrents, repeated year after
year.

PROMOTION OF FORESTRY

Despite Professor Moore's very positive denial of the value of
reforestation as a preventive of floods, it is claimed by many
authorities that much of the destruction is due to the fact that the
states of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois have been almost denuded of such
forests as originally stood there. No impediment is offered to the flow
of water and disastrous results follow. But in any event there would
have been great floods because of the location of the rainstorms as
noted.

CONSTRUCTION OF DAMS

The topography of