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Ship-Canal.—Dr. Cullen’s plan for crossing the Isthmusof Panama by a ship canal has received the emphatic testimonyin its favour of the veteran Alexander Von Humboldt. “Afterhaving,” he says, “laboured, in vain, during half-a-century, toprove the possibility of an occunic canal, and to point out thegulf of San Miguel and Cupica as the points most worthy ofattention—after having regretted, almost with bitterness, in thelast edition of ‘My Aspects of Nature,’ that the employment ofthe means which the present state of our knowledge affords forobtaining precise measurements has been so long delayed, Iought, more than anyone else, to be satisfied to see, at last, myhopes for so noble an enterprise revived.... The under-taking is by no means above the Intellectual and material powerwhich civilized nations have attained to. The work should beone to last for ever. It should not commence with a canal withlocks, like the magnificent Caledonian canal; it must be a really
oceanic canal, without locks—a free passage from sea to sea,across which the speed of the navigation will be modified, butnot interrupted, by the difference in height and non-coincidenceof the tides.”
