OUTLINE OF THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE STATE OF MISSISSIPPI. Mississippi lies between the meridians of 88° 6' and 91° 37′ of west longitude, and between the parallels of 30° 11′ and 35° north latitude. The greatest dimensions of the state are 331 miles north and south and 188 miles east and west. The total area (including half of the boundary portions of Mississippi and Pearl rivers and Bay Saint Louis) is 46,810 square miles, of which 470 square miles is water surface. About 7,460 square miles are lowlands of the Mississippi bottom. Of this area, 7,100 belong to the "Yazoo bottom" plain. The rest, or five-sixths of the state's area, is rolling, hilly, or sometimes almost level timbered uplands. CLIMATE.-The climate of Mississippi is a "warm temperate" one in the literal sense of the term, the extremes of temperature prevailing farther north being tempered materially by the influence of the winds blowing from the Gulf of Mexico. The extreme cold of winter sometimes occurring in the northern part of the state (at Oxford and Holly Springs, where ordinarily the winter minimum is from 150 to 200 F.) is 100 F., sufficient to kill fig trees six years old; but at Grenada, on the Yalobusha river, the fig rarely suffers. At Vicksburg and Natchez the extreme cold thus far observed is 17° F.; inland, at Jackson, several degrees lower. It is only near the sea-coast that the orange and lemon can ordinarily be grown without winter protection in the open air. A warm belt extends along the Mississippi river, but, unlike that of the coast, it is liable to "cold snaps" from the influence of northwest winds, which render the outdoor culture of the subtropical fruits precarious even as far south as Baton Rouge. Cool belts or regions are formed by the elevated ridge lands at the heads of the larger rivers of the state. The summers are long, practically including May and September. During this time the weather is warm (the usual range of the thermometer being from 70° to 90° F.), but excessive heat and sultriness, such as prevails so commonly during the shorter summers in the middle and northern states, is rare, and sunstroke is almost unknown. The following table (extracted from those published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1876) gives the mean temperatures for each of the four seasons for some of the prominent points in the state where observations have been made. Where these were deficient, those for points lying near the line in Tennessee and Louisiana have been introduced: It will be noted that, with one exception, the average temperatures given for interior stations are decidedly lower than for stations on the Mississippi river in corresponding latitudes. Compare in this respect Vicksburg with Jackson and Natchez with Brookhaven. In the case of Memphis and La Grange, however, the relation is reversed, from causes not thus far understood, but evidently operating so 9 |