Editor:

I was aware that, in its heyday, the Army Corps of Engineers had pulled off some pretty amazing feats of landscape manipulation. All the same, I was truly astonished to discover from the NCJ's graphic of the 1852 configuration of the mouth of Humboldt Bay that the North and South spits actually got transposed ("Treacherous Maw," Dec. 19). Army Corps of Wizards would be more like it! It's humbling (and perhaps a little scary) to think what the agency might be capable of today given adequate funding. Certainly nothing to spit at.

Ken Burton, Eureka