There has not been a single new book produced during the week which will be heard of or known in the year 1900; we fear we might say 1875.

The venerable Baron Humboldt has written the following letter to Dr. Cuxlen, the projector of the Darien ship canal:

Potsdam, June 4, 1853:

Sir: I am very much to blame for having so long delayed an answer to the agreeable and interesting despatch that you have been kind enough to forward me, by the hands of Mr. Augustus Peterman, so estimable by his character as well as by the solidity of his geographical labors.

Dr. Cullen cannot doubt the high importance that I would attach to the merit of his courageous and useful investigations in the eastern part of the Isthmus of Panama; knowing my position and my antediluvian age, he will receive with indulgence, even so late, the expression of my lively gratitude.

After having labored in vain, during half a century, to prove the possibility of an oceanic canal, and to point out the Gulf of San Miguel and Cupica as the points most worthy of attention; after having regretted, almost with bitterness, in the last edition of my "Aspects of Nature," that the employment of the means which the present state of our knowledge affords for obtaining precise measurements has been so long delayed, I ought, more than any one else, to be satisfied to see at last my hopes for so noble an enterprise revived.

By your publications, sir, and by that of Mr. Gisborne, will be originated the great work of changing an important part of the commerce of nations, and of rendering more accessible the rich countries of Eastern Asia and the Indian Archipelago.

The undertaking is by no means above the intellectual and material power which civilized nations have attained to.

The work should be one to last forever; it should not commence with a canal with locks, like the magnificent Caledonian canal; it must be a really oceanic canal, without a lock, a free passage from sea to sea, across which the course of the navigation will be modified, but not interrupted, by the difference in height and non-coincidence of the tides.

Receive, I pray you, sir, the expression of my great consideration.

Yours, &c. Alexander von Humboldt.