Volume 5 — Original. The Father of Waters.

Some one has said that rivers are the great moving highways of the world. In the earlier ages, when, from a restless and feverish impulse, whole nations became nomadic, their migrations were doubtless influenced by the rivers lying in their track. History tells of barbaric people that wandered around the Euxine and along the banks of the lower Danube found their way to central Europe.

Before the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, rivers, and especially the Rhine, played a considerable part in that extensive commerce which found its way from India to the cities of the Hanseatic League. Weary caravans brought the spices, gems, and rich fabrics of the East to the shore of the Mediterranean, whence they were carried westward mainly by Venetian traders timidly skirting the coast in their frail barks, venturing up rivers or making long journeys wherever the prospect of traffic invited. The old castles on the Rhine were built by feudal robbers, who were wont to descend from their strongholds to plunder merchants travelling on this great thoroughfare of mediaeval commerce.

In time they were induced to forego the chances of occasional booty for the payment of a stipulated toll. Doubtless the princely Hohenzollern could trace back their genealogy to the feudal high-toll barons of the Rhine, who furnished the original idea of the modern Zollverein of Germany. La mer, c'est l'empire, and, after the great maritime discoveries had opened a new route to India, it, in good part, diverted that distant commerce from the rivers, which the ocean reaches like shining arms over the continents as if to grasp dominion. As the elements of modern civilization became developed, societies crystallized, and the nationalities hitherto disturbed by migrations and conquests settled down where we now find them, rivers came gradually to serve their legitimate purpose of internal and international communication—a purpose resembling that which they fulfil in the physical economy of the earth, they are the veins which bring back to the ocean, through innumerable brooks and rills, seeming to have their sources in the ground, yet having unseen springs in the air, the moisture that the sun has already drawn up from the seas in invisible buckets, and wafted away in shining clouds to be poured out in rain or dew upon the thirsty hills.

Our own country, however, furnishes the best illustration of the importance and use of rivers. Its great physical features, of which the river system is perhaps the most striking, seem to make it a fit arena for those wonderful triumphs over the elements and the forces of nature which it is our privilege to enjoy. Their vastness would have intimidated races of men, weak and cowardly from long habits of servility, superstitious, torn with fierce passions and hatreds, and able to contend with the fatality of material things only on that diminutive scale afforded by the physical conformation of Europe.

The traveller descending the lower Danube finds the ruins of old Roman towns, Trajan's way cut for a distance of thirty miles in the steep solid rock of the Carpathians for the passage of his Roman legions, and, below the Iron Gate, the piers of Trajan's bridge, erected by him for the same purpose nearly eighteen centuries ago. Hardly less remarkable are the memorials of the bloody wars between the Christians and the Turks, the places made memorable by the campaigns of Eugene and Suwarrow and the Eastern war. But, excepting now and then a walled town, there are to be seen comparatively few habitations of men, and none of that active, sleepless life which lines the banks of our great rivers.

There are no richer plains in the world than those of the lower Danube. Why is it that the pent-up millions of Western Europe do not find their way thither, as in the time of Trajan vast multitudes emigrated from slavery impoverished Italy to that Eldorado of the Roman world? The very facility afforded by the river for hostile inroads has driven or kept the inhabitants from its banks, and to a great extent left them desolate wastes. The feverish restlessness which once made barbarous nations nomadic now seizes upon the individual; and a constant stream of immigration, oppressed by the despotisms of the Old World, bursts forth in the midst of us like a new fountain of Arethusa.

And in our own country the astonishing facilities of communication afforded by the telegraph and long lines of railroads seem to detract somewhat from the importance of rivers. We can only appreciate their value when we think of them in connection with the toil requisite for subduing the wilderness and laying under contribution the resources of our country. How earnestly and bravely our forefathers battled in this warfare, one generation taking up the task where it was left by another, so as to subdue the land and render possible such marvels as the Pacific railroad! Whatever may be the social development of the human race hereafter, and however wonderful the applications of art and science to the uses of life, will not our own age be looked back upon as perhaps the grandest in its history? To have lived in a period that saw the mysteries of Central Africa explained, the continents united with telegraphic nerves, the oceans traversed with steamships and monitors, the seas clasped together with railways, and, as we hope, the thin air made a navigable element, will be to have enjoyed the most startling triumphs of emotion of which the soul is capable.

What first strikes the attention upon comparing the rivers of the New and the Old World is the diminutive size of the latter, especially of many in the most civilized portions of Europe, or rendered famous in classical times. The Nile, with its ancient mysteries, its dim historic memorials of one of the oldest civilizations, its stupendous monuments of human wisdom and of human folly over which the centuries have brooded in solemn silence, and its wonderful physical peculiarities, is, indeed, a magnificent river. Reaching from the Mediterranean to the central regions of Africa, and forming an intimate connection with its great lake and river system, it will doubtless accomplish for that portion of Africa what the Mississippi has done, and is now doing, in the material development of the United States—what the Danube may also accomplish in Eastern Europe, the Amazon in South America, and the Hoang Ho in Eastern Asia, when their expiring strata of civilizations shall have been aroused by the restless, aggressive spirit of modern times. The Jordan is only a mountain torrent. The Tiber and the Po can be swum with a single arm. The Simois and Scamander, the sacred rivers of Troy, are, like the Rubicon, the merest brooks, and would hardly drive a saw-mill. The Cephisus can be leaped across, and the Ilissus scarcely suffices for a few Athenian washerwomen, sorry representatives of its nymphs and graces of old.

The Mississippi river drains not far from a million and a quarter square miles of territory, equal to about one third of the extent of Europe. From the source of the Missouri, on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, to the Balize, is, following the windings of the river, a distance of four thousand five hundred miles. A circular line drawn through the head waters of the Mississippi and its chief tributaries would not be less than six thousand miles in length. With all of its confluents the Mississippi forms a great moving sinuous highway fully twenty-five thousand miles long, and ploughed by many thousand steamboats. They stretch out as if to embrace the beauty, to grasp the wealth, and gather, as into a lap, the products of the vast region between the two mountain chains of the continent; the coal and oil of the Alleghanies, the gold of the Rocky Mountains, the grain, lumber, and lead of the North, and the cotton, sugar, and tropical fruits of the South. Equally well will they serve for the distribution of the Asiatic commerce and travel which will be poured across the continent on the completion of the Pacific railroad. St. Louis may then become a great distributing centre, and the same causes which have made London, Paris, Vienna, and Pekin the commercial capitals of their respective countries, may, in time, give that favored and opulent city the supremacy now enjoyed by the great marts of trade on the Atlantic coast. It is hardly safe to predict what may be the social and material, much less the intellectual possibilities of that near period, when, gliding on "the pale iron edge," we may jostle Chinese mandarins en route for Europe, and European money kings on their way to the Golcondas of the East.

The lotus-eating tourist of the Nile floats dreamily along the river between quaint villages and graceful palm-trees, past the pyramids, past the deserted sites of ancient cities, past the stupendous ruins of Luxor and Thebes. The monotony of the desert is broken by gloomy hills of sunburnt rock, and by the narrow strip of verdure which fringes both banks of the river. Should he push his explorations further, he will come in contact with the barbarous negro tribes of the upper Nile, and may encounter troops of giraffes and elephants.

How different the objects that attract the attention of the voyage up the Mississippi! The eye is charmed with the prospect of orange groves, of vast fields of sugar-cane of the deepest green, and of cotton plantations whose verdure and bloom at the proper season are only equalled in beauty by the snow-like whiteness of the opened balls. The forests are hung with long festoons of moss, giving them a sombre, funereal aspect. For between two and three hundred miles, both river banks, called coasts in Louisiana, are lined almost continuously with plantations, which, before the war, were in a high state of cultivation and furnished homes of luxury. The region now teeming with such active and varied life, inspired by the adjacent city of New Orleans, is made romantic by the adventures of De Soto and La Salle, and the wandering hither of the Acadians, known as Cagians by the Louisianians, whose sufferings in the wilderness excited even the compassion of hostile savages. Further up the river vast forests intervene, with here and there a straggling town or settlement on the banks. The monotony is broken by the sight of enormous flat-boats and rafts floating lazily down the current; and an occasional column of black smoke rising high above the trees in the distance indicates the presence of a steamboat, but, so crooked is the river, it is often impossible to say whether above or below. In consequence of the great bends, approaching boats are sometimes moving in parallel lines in the same direction, or are absolutely diverging and running from each other. Now and then the huge steamboat stops to land, perhaps, a single passenger, or, at long intervals, at a wood-yard where some settler is laying the foundation of a future fortune, the stump being usually the first product of American industry. The rude, vigorous, untamed aspect of the region seems, to a certain degree, to be reflected in the characteristics of the passengers on board. Still further north the traveller begins first to feel the pulses of that wonderful life which is throbbing throughout the great West. Here are vast prairies waving with fields of grain, and dotted with mounds built perhaps before the pyramids of Egypt. Up the Missouri one will soon reach the great plains on which roam herds of buffaloes and tribes of red men. About the head-waters of the Mississippi and its chief confluents is to be found some of the wildest mountain scenery on the continent. Where, upon the banks of a single river, are to be seen such varieties of climate, scenery, and animated life?

Very remarkable are the physical, it might almost be said paradoxical, characteristics of the Mississippi. Its average width below Natchez is not so great as from Natchez to Cairo. At Vicksburg, the river rises and falls about forty feet; at New Orleans not more than twelve feet. During the lowest stage of water, the largest ships experience but little difficulty in crossing the bar at the passes; when the great floods have filled the banks above to overflowing, deep-draught vessels can hardly be got over the bar. Below the mouth of Red river streams run out of the Mississippi instead of into it. Much of the distance below Cairo the river runs, not in an ordinary channel between the hills, but on the crest of a ridge of its own formation. The source of the Mississippi is about two and a half miles nearer the centre of the earth than the mouth, thereby causing it to run actually uphill.

The delta of the Mississippi, properly, extends from the mouth of the Red river to the gulf, a distance of about three hundred miles, following the windings of the river. It has an area of about fourteen thousand square miles, and its numerous bayous form an admirable system of natural canals. To the delta really belongs the left bank of the river below Manshac, where the bayou Manshac formed an outlet from the Mississippi to lake Pontchartrain, until it was closed by General Jackson in the war of 1812, to prevent the British getting into the river above New Orleans. The bayou could not be reopened without jeopardizing the safety of the city. A crevasse some distance above New Orleans, a few years ago, inundated the back streets. Skiffs took the place of omnibuses, and when the waters subsided some of the residents were surprised to find alligators "herbivorating" in their gardens. There is also a large partially alluvial tract west of the Atchafalaya, which covers the wonderful salt mine of Petit Aunce Island, and out through which ooze the petroleum springs of Calcasieu, where the Cagians have long been in the habit or greasing the axles of their rude carts.

Extending from the mouth of the Red river to a point above Cairo is the great alluvial plain of the Mississippi, varying from thirty to fifty miles in width, and containing a territory of about seventeen thousand square miles. The bluffs retreat from the east side of the river in many places, making room for rich bottom lands, and touch the river only at one point on the west side, namely, at Helena, Arkansas. From Cairo to the Balize is by the river almost twelve hundred miles, while in a straight line it is only five hundred. The frequent changes in the bed of the Mississippi, caused by "cut-offs," where it forces a channel through a narrow neck of land around which it has hitherto flowed in a wide circuit, have left numerous semicircular lakes and fausses rivières, whose tranquil waters abound with alligators and wild fowl.

The soil of the delta is filled with whole trees deposited while it was in process of formation. A sudden change in the direction of the river sometimes unearths the trunks, standing erect and close together, as if they had grown where they are found. While boring an artesian well in New Orleans, they came upon a solid cypress log nearly five hundred feet below the surface. The Mississippi is said to be, geologically, one of the oldest rivers on the globe. We happened to be with Professor Hyrtl of Vienna a few years ago, when be received, as a contribution to his unequalled museum of natural history, a couple of ganoid fishes, now to be found only in the "father of waters." They were clad in coats of mail, fitting them for existence in bodies of water dashed about by conflicting tempests and currents and convulsed by the upheavals of the earth. At the base of the obelisk of Heliopolis, erected by Sesostris four thousand years ago, one can see that, during that long interval of time, the valley of the Nile has been raised about nine feet around the monument. A friend of mine, engaged in sinking a shaft in the alluvium over the salt mine of Petit Aunce Island, recently exhumed the skeleton of a mastodon, and the rude implements and traces of the habitation of a people that must have passed away centuries ago. Skirting the delta on the gulf shore are vast shell-banks, consisting entirely of millions upon millions of cubic yards of small sea-shells. The popular superstition of the country ascribes their origin to the Indians, who came down to the coast for subsistence and deposited the shells where they are now found. But their existence in such vast quantities, in a purely alluvial region, is one of the curious problems of geology. In view of these facts, what ages upon ages is the mind carried back by the formation of the delta and the great alluvial plain of the Mississippi, to that far-off time when the place they now occupy was covered with a silent sea in which floundered the ichthyosauri of the pre-Adamic period!

The most remarkable feature of the lower Mississippi, and that which gives origin to very many of the peculiarities already mentioned, is the annual rise of its waters in consequence of the rain and melting of the snow above. Egypt owes its fruitfulness in great part to the sediment yearly deposited by the Nile wherever it overflows the land. We saw fellahs scattering seed upon the fresh and scarcely uncovered ooze, almost in the shadow of the Great Pyramid, and treading it in with oxen, as mentioned by Herodotus. The side canals are filled when the flood is at its height, and every possible means is employed to retard the fertilizing waters for irrigation, as rain very rarely falls. Just below the head of the delta an immense barrage, or dam, has been built across both the Damietta and Rosetta branches of the Nile, for the purpose of keeping back the flood. When the Nilometer indicates that the river has risen to a certain height, there is rejoicing throughout Egypt, a plentiful harvest being safely predicted from a full river.

It is directly the reverse along the Mississippi. The planter depends upon the rains, not upon irrigation; upon the accumulated alluvial richness of former ages, and not upon the annual deposit of the river. He does not invite an overflow, but labors to prevent it by every means in his power. A low stage of water, like that of 1864, is hailed as a providential blessing. The unprecedented floods of the present year have swept away millions of dollars worth of property, and produced extreme misery.

The lower Mississippi generally begins to rise in November or early in December, and, with rare exceptions, attains the maximum volume in April or May. The rise is at first gradual, and usually comes from the tributaries below the Ohio. As the season advances, the rains and the melting of the winter snows enlarge the Tennessee, the Cumberland, the Ohio, and the upper Mississippi, whose freshets, often amounting to devastating floods, and sometimes becoming vast inundations, are successively poured into the lower Mississippi. Finally, and sometimes as late as June, the Missouri contributes the drainage of the great plains and of the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. Descending steamboats, which have overtaken and passed the rise, announce the coming of a great tidal wave bringing possible destruction with it. The bottures of the lower river are first covered, the banks are rapidly filled, and the torrent of foaming and turbid waters begins to rush down with accumulated velocity. Immense quantities of driftwood are drawn into the swiftest part of the current, in a continuous line that twists and writhes in the tortuous channel like a great black serpent, or is, day after day, whirled round in vast eddies, as at Port Hudson. Many a Federal soldier who has stood guard on the banks of the Mississippi will remember the great trees, with roots and branches high in the air, that floated down in grim processions, and in the gloom and darkness of the night seemed to glide past like spectral fleets. As the river rises, immense bodies of water escape from the natural channel and flow away into the swamps of Arkansas, Mississippi, and upper Louisiana. The low alluvial plain of the Mississippi becomes a vast reservoir. Without this, it would be impossible to control the flood below. The banks are entirely covered, and the voyager beholds an immense lake spread out before him, whose waters rush through the forest with a subdued and angry roar, the wide open space between the trees alone indicating the course of the river. And now, wherever in this vast region civilization has planted her foot, begins that conflict between man and the elements and the forces of nature, which in one form or another is as old as the human race. In Egypt it was typified in the never-ending contest of Typhon and Osiris. Osiris represented the fertile land of Egypt, the product of the Nile; Typhon, the encroaching desert, as solitary and incomprehensible as the ocean itself, the desert whose storms and waves or shifting sand, respecting only the places they cannot reach, have destroyed armies and caravans, depopulated immense regions, and turned the course of mighty rivers. The old civilization of Egypt, the giant Antaeus of mythology, who could not be vanquished so long as his foot touched the solid, fertile earth, interposed enormous obstacles to the advances and inroads of the desert. Count de Persigny wrote a book during his political imprisonment to prove that the pyramids were built as barriers to protect the alluvial land of the Nile from the encroaching sand of the desert.

To progress is, everywhere, to combat. The human race maintains a perpetual and tremendous strife with the fatality of material things, whether it be in the form of the stubborn elements, the overwhelming forces of nature, or the subtle, inexorable laws that govern the material world. Barbarism is a defeat, from cowardice of spirit; civilization, a triumph over them. And nowhere else is the conflict more terrible than where it is attempted to control the floods that sweep down the valley of the Mississippi from the very heart of the continent. The forces of the winds and of the ocean are not so irresistible. It is a hand-to-hand combat, in which to be vanquished is to be destroyed. The thousands of miles of levees built on the banks of the Mississippi and its great bayous, at an expense of many million dollars, are the means employed to arrest the watery element. In some places they are between fifteen and eighteen feet high, with a base of one hundred and twenty feet. As the threatening river rises against them, they are put in the best condition, and watched with the utmost care, lest the little crawfish, or accident, a storm, or some malicious enemy should make an opening which, ever so small at first, would rapidly enlarge into a crevasse. Sometimes the river bank caves in, carrying away the levee, and permitting the water to rush in uninterruptedly. In the spring of 1863 the writer of this article rode in a carriage one evening around a point of land a few miles above Baton Rouge, which, to the extent of several acres, disappeared during the night. The following day the fields in the rear resembled a large lake. Shortly after the capture of Port Hudson, a portion of the bank slid into the river with a battery of guns. The famous citadel and many of the rebel earthworks on those historical bluffs have since shared the same fate.

Should the levee, from any cause, give way, every possible effort is made to close the breach. Planters from miles above and below hurry to the crevasse with all their available help. Piles are driven into the ground close together, and in two parallel rows a few feet apart, both above and below the opening, and in such a direction as gradually to have the lines approach each other at no great distance in the rear of the crevasse. Between these rows of piles are thrown sacks of earth, hay, or anything that will arrest the rushing flood. Presently the narrowing space between the dams can be spanned with pieces of timber, and then the torrent is soon checked and the levee replaced.

The State of Louisiana paid last year thirty thousand dollars for closing the Bouligny crevasse, a few miles below New Orleans. Crevasses above the city, owing to their greater magnitude, are, however, rarely closed. An effort was made in 1865 to rebuild the great Chim and Robinson levee, on the right bank of the river, a short distance below Port Hudson. This crevasse occurred in 1863, and was of such enormous extent that, through it, a river more than a mile wide and several feet deep rushed out of the Mississippi. A steamboat, several flatboats and rafts, and vast quantities of driftwood were swept into the irresistible torrent. It required over three hundred thousand cubic yards of earth to replace the levee, and an outlay or nearly one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The tremendous flood of last April broke through the newly constructed work. The levee commissioners refused an offer to close the crevasse for eighty thousand dollars, and in a few days a great part of the new levee was swept away. Deep gulches were cut in the plantations where the disaster occurred. The ditches were filled, sandbanks formed in many places, and the sugar-cane fields covered with the débris of the Mississippi. There were two or three crevasses of nearly equal magnitude between Port Hudson and the mouth of Red river, and upper Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi suffered terribly from the overflow, caused in great part by the breaking away of the newly built levees. The entire valley of Red river, whose bottoms furnish perhaps the best cotton lands in the world, was inundated below Jefferson, Texas. Many of the best buildings in Shreveport and Alexandria were undermined. The planters betook themselves to the upper rooms of their houses, and the cattle crowded together on the little knolls found here and there on the river bank. A friend who came down during the inundation stated that he saw at least twenty thousand animals thus perishing from hunger, and being gradually swept away by the rising flood. At one time thirteen parishes were said to be in great part under water. Many millions' worth of property was destroyed, and the unstinted charity of the Federal government to the sufferers, through the Freedmen's Bureau, was measured only by cargoes of provisions sent to their relief.

But the overflows of the Mississippi have this year been still more disastrous. Instead of pouring out successive floods, Red river, the Arkansas, the Ohio and its great tributaries, and even the upper Mississippi have risen simultaneously and poured their mighty inundations into the lower river. The Mississippi was at one time fifty miles wide at Memphis, and the great alluvial plain or basin became an inland sea several hundred miles in length. There have for some time been but few places where landings could be made between Cairo and the mouth of Red river. Days and even weeks must elapse after the river begins to recede at Cairo before it can be affected at New Orleans or even at Vicksburg, so enormous is the body of water that must find its way to the gulf. The bottom-lands of Mississippi, especially those of the Yazoo region, and of upper Louisiana, were nearly all under water before the delta people suffered from the inundation. But as the irresistible flood swept down toward the gulf, levee after levee gave way, and at present the tracts overflowed can be estimated only by parishes and counties, the plantations only by thousands, and the loss of property only by millions of dollars. There are nearly a dozen crevasses between the mouth of Red river and New Orleans, not one of which it has been possible to stop. The crevasse at Grand Levee, Morganza, is a mile wide, and through it rushes a river twelve feet deep. To restrain the mighty flood would require immense levees through the entire delta, several feet higher than those already constructed.

The parish of Tensas, the finest cotton district of Louisiana, is almost entirely under water. The inundation extends far up the Cortableau and almost to the rich prairies of Opelousas. The sugar plantations of Terrebonne and Lafourche are invaded by the flood, and the Opelousas railroad rendered useless. The rich lands of Grosse Tête, Fordoce, and the Marangouin, for the first time in the memory of Creoles, are almost entirely inundated. Thousands of families have been driven from their homes. Certain districts, overflowed for three successive years, begin to assume the appearance of a wilderness. The garfish, the alligator, and wildfowl have, in fact, resumed possession of many of the choicest portions of the state. Should the waters not soon subside, the product of cotton on the bottom-lands of Louisiana and Mississippi will be very small. April is the month for planting, and from present appearances the floods will not begin to recede before the month of May.

So great is the interest of the Northern States in the cotton and sugar produced an the bottom-lands of the Mississippi, that evidently the general government ought to assume the responsibility of rebuilding the levees on a scale that will insure protection. This policy would be at variance with the traditions of the government as regards internal improvements. But neither the planters who have hitherto been assessed for nearly the entire outlay, nor the impoverished states, are now in a condition to do what is required.

Of the two plans proposed far leveeing the delta of the Mississippi, one consists in increasing the number of the bayous, or lateral outlets, and thereby diminishing the volume of water in the main channel; the other, in closing up all the bayous, and, with levees of sufficient strength, retaining the floods in the natural bed of the river. In some remarks made upon the subject by Mr. Banks in Congress, he expressed his preference for the former theory, and intimated his intention, should the proper occasion occur, of advocating a large appropriation by the general government to put it in practical execution. The general government has, in fact, virtually pledged itself to undertake the work as soon as the Southern States again come into the Union. Mr. Banks is well acquainted with the topography of Louisiana, and can estimate the enormous outlay required for leveeing the bayous Lafourche and Plaquemine, to say nothing of the Atchafalaya, and opening new outlets, upon each of which, however small, the work would have to be done as thoroughly and upon as vast a scale as upon the Mississippi itself. This theory is based upon the false assumption that, in case of a bayou or a crevasse, the depth of the river at any point below the outlet is diminished exactly in proportion to the quantity of water taken by it from the main channel. When the great crevasse, over a mile wide, occurred last spring above Baton Rouge, I could not see that the volume of water at Baton Rouge was much diminished thereby, but the current of the river was materially lessened. When several large crevasses occur, of course, both the volume and the current of the river below must be diminished. And the slower the current, the greater the deposit of sediment on the bed of the river, the effect of which is to lift up the whole body of water and increase the tendency to overflow. The great desideratum is to prevent the formation of deposit, which can be done only by maintaining a certain rapidity of current. The more effective and scientific plan would, therefore, seen to be to confine the floods to a single channel by means of levees built sufficiently far back to prevent their destruction by the caving in of the river banks, and strong enough for any emergency. The work of leveeing would thus be concentrated, vast areas of now useless swamp-land would be made available, and the bayous could be used as canals for internal communication. Nor should it be forgotten that, as the regions bordering the tributaries of the Mississippi are settled and the forests cleared up, the actual quantity of water drained from them is from year to year diminished. The floods of the upper Mississippi have already been notably affected by this general law. But disasters like those of the present year, although exceptional, can be averted only by levees constructed upon a gigantic scale, and, as the wilderness of the great alluvial plain whose swamps now receive such vast quantities of water becomes settled like the delta, the levees will have to be proportionally enlarged.