420 Bevieu-s — 3IM. BeHraud ^ Zarcher— 



entitled " Piercing the Isthmus of Panama," an article evidently 

 written in an optimistic spirit which is rather amusing in the light 

 of subsequent events. It commences as follows : — 



" Three years ago the work of cutting through the Panama 

 Isthmus had barely commenced. The equatorial forests on the 

 neck of land, 73 kilometers long, which marked the axis of the 

 future interoceanic canal, had hardly been laid bare. The traveller 

 who followed the primitive road met here and there some groups 

 of cabins with roofs of branches on poles, marking the site of 

 a sounding or the impi'ovised dwellings of a portion of the operators. 

 Ciilebra, Emperador, Corosita, and Gamboa, which are now full of 

 activity, were then almost desert, and on the coast of Colon alone 

 tlie excavator traced in the marshy plains of Gatun his great track. 

 The contrast to-day is great : a long file of workshops covers the 

 space between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Twenty thousand 

 workmen toil on the Cordillera, making the deep cutting for the 

 canal. Side by side with this army, another more powerful army 

 of colossal machines, excavators, dredges, locomotives, waggons, 

 all the materials for transport, thousands of pairs of wheels, hundreds 

 of kilometres of sails, mountains of coal, and shiploads of dynamite. 

 Among the twenty-five workshops of the peninsula the attention is 

 chiefly attracted to two points : the great rocky cutting at Culebra, 

 which is to penetrate to a depth of 120 metres into the Cordillera, 

 and the dam of the Chagres at Gamboa. At Culebra the previsions 

 of M. de Lesseps have been realised ; tbe mountainous mass whicb 

 the canal will traverse is, for the most part, composed of rocks 

 wliich are not very hard ; repeated soundings by means of diamond 

 perforators have shown that down to a considerable depth the rock 

 takes the form of schists [s«o] in horizontal strata. There is no 

 doubt that it can be cut through with rapidity ; it is a matter of 

 perforation, either by mining and ordinary explosives, or by shafts 

 with larger quantities of some explosive to displace great masses. 

 Here 30,000 cubic metres of rock have been displaced by an 

 explosion of dynamite ; and unquestionably this colossal channel 

 connecting two seas may be executed by simple methods and with 

 economy." 



The article from which the above extract is taken was probably 

 written by an engineer rather than by a geologist, but the writer 

 gives us an interesting picture of work then going on, and we may 

 shortly expect to see such worlc renewed to the finish. 



Meanwhile, it will be convenient to consider the geological aspects 

 of the question as set forth in the two short though important 

 memoirs to which Professor Bertrand has mainly contributed. 



In dealing with the subject of previous publications the authors 

 state that the actual base of our knowledge of the age of the beds 

 of Panama is to be found in two notes published by M. Douville 

 in 1891 and 1898. The first of these notes was founded on the 

 examination of a series of fossil specimens collected by M. Canelle, 

 a former engineer of the Canal Company. The second, of which 

 a resume only has already appeared (December, 1898), has had for 



