Dr. Cullen’s plan for crossing the Isthmus of Panamaby a Ship Canal has received the emphatic testimony inits favour of the veteran Alexander Von Humboldt.—“After having,” he says, “laboured in vain, duringhalf a century, to prove the possibility of an ‘OceanicCanal,’ and to point out the Gulf of San Miguel andCupica as the points most worthy of attention,—afterhaving regretted, almost with bitterness, in the lastedition of my ‘Aspects of Nature,’ that the employ-ment of the means which the present state of our know-ledge affords for obtaining precise measurements hasbeen so long delayed—I ought more than any one else,to be satisfied to see, at last, my hopes for so noble anenterprise revived. * * The undertaking is by nomeans above the intellectual and material power whichcivilized nations have attained to. The work shouldbe one to last for ever. It should not commence witha canal with locks, like the magnificent CaledonianCanal; it must be a really ‘Oceanic Canal,’ withoutlocks—a free passage from sea to sea, across which thespeed of the navigation will be modified, but not inter-rupted by the difference in height and non-coincidenceof the tides.”