“In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year.
“Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the old Oolitic Silurian Period, must a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod.
“And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have their streets joined together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen.
“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” –Mark Twain 
Writers are often cautioned about our use of metaphors. Metaphors are very helpful in getting a point across by showing the similarities of two things. But you can always push a metaphor too far, and make it say things that are obviously not what you, or the original person intended. Things that are totally and obviously crazy and wrong.
Mark Twain shows that science can be prone to the same thing. Our lives are based on a lot of scientific advancement in our culture. But we expect and think that science can prove a lot of things, when actually it proves very. little. Its applications are very practical, but its proofs are very empty, or lead to extreme, and extremely inaccurate conclusions.
I think of another field where this lack of perspective can get in the way. History.
Dick Peer was a retired editor of The Leader, Corning, NY, when I worked at the paper in the late 1980s, and continued to write a community/history column. In one of his columns he talked about a place called Little Flats, and identified it with South Corning. My grandmother pointed out to me that he was wrong.
Dick’s error was reading the description, and putting it on a modern map. But what he failed to factor in was the river. Like the Mississippi in Twain’s science, the Chemung river had been eroding South in that area over the years. What had once been a respectable “Little Flats” on the south side of the river from “Big Flats” slowly disappeared as the River moved.
One can do the same sort of thing with any historical document — read it with a modern sensibility, a modern map, instead of the map it was written with. Not that we shouldn’t apply our modern understanding, but not without first coming to grips with the prior age as an age equally worthy of respect. C.S. Lewis warned against “Chronological Snobbery”, or the ranking of an age as better than another, just because it comes later.
I know my point has come a meandering course from Twain’s talk of the course of the Mississippi. Let me just come back to say we are in an age skeptical of many things, but often not skeptical enough of the things it should. Broaden your perspective, have more respect for other ages and opinions, and increase our skepticism of extreme projections and metaphors .
At The Rainbow 