May 18, 1906.] 



SCIENCE. 



771 



rations are being made to fill in the lock 

 chamber excavated by the French at Ob- 

 ispo and start in with steam shovels. 

 Track has been laid out from the main line 

 of the Panama Eailroad. All idea of 

 double-tracking this road has been aban- 

 doned, and instead gangs of men are put- 

 ting in sidings at all stations. Only fifteen 

 trains a day now run, and the capacity of 

 the single track ought to be three or four 

 times as great as this, with proper handling. 

 Lack of rolling-stock has been a serious 

 drawback. The engineer party at Obispo 

 has been cross-sectioning the tunnel-line to 

 the Atlantic discovered by Engineer Boyd 

 Ehle, but no further advantages have de- 

 veloped, and the net result has been more 

 topography. In general, most of the late 

 surveys have been entirely of a dilatory 

 nature; presumably they have been made 

 in order to keep the large surplus of engi- 

 neers to some extent employed. Work at 

 the Colon end, in default of proper facili- 

 ties for unloading vessels, has been of no 

 consequence, and there seems to be a doubt 

 as to the best course to pursue. Division 

 Engineer Moltkey wants to take ships up 

 the canal to a place where there is about 

 thirty feet of water and soft-mud bottom. 

 In the meantime the shipping has to be 

 handled as before. 



According to this observer, the most dif- 

 ficult thing to realize on the isthmus is 

 what the 11,000 men are doing; certainly 

 it amounts to very little. Here and there 

 groups of workmen can be seen puttering 

 away, but at the end of a week or a month 

 there is a very inconsiderable result to 

 show for it, and taking the present rate of 

 progress as a measure, it would seem as 

 though the work might go on indefinitely. 

 It is particularly disappointing to Amer- 

 icans to realize that the French must have 

 made a much better showing when exca- 

 vating 70,000,000 cubic yards and building 



nearly 1,500 houses and quarters, in spite 

 of great financial embarrassments. My in- 

 formant is of the opinion that it has yet to 

 be demonstrated that the Anglo-Saxon is 

 better fitted for the task than the Latin, 

 in spite of Chairman Shonts's excuses. It 

 is a notable fact, he says, that men new to 

 the tropics need from six months to a year 

 to comprehend the combined effect of the 

 inertia due to climate, the inefficiency of 

 labor, and the paralysis of energy due to 

 bureaucracy and red tape. 



So much, then, for the statements of en- 

 gineers who have recently returned from 

 the isthmus. A certain allowance must 

 be made for the personal equation. No 

 one man— no group of men — can possibly 

 know all that is to be known about the 

 Panama Canal, and it is a common human 

 tendency to criticize when one, perhaps, 

 does not quite understand. None of us is 

 quite free from this tendency. Let us 

 turn, then, for a moment, from the criti- 

 cism of labor conditions to a brief state- 

 ment of actual accomplishment at the isth- 

 mus. In any difiicult enterprise, when one 

 gets discouraged at what has yet to be done, 

 it is heartening to pause a minute and con- 

 sider what has, after all and in spite of all, 

 been done. 



The total yardage excavated on the 

 Panama Canal to date is about eighty 

 million cubic yards. The yardage that 

 directly applies along the canal route as 

 finally determined is about forty-one mil- 

 lions. On the eighty-foot level plan, this 

 means that about 28 per cent, of the big 

 ditch has been dug ; on the sixty-foot level 

 plan, about 23 per cent. ; on the thirty-foot 

 level plan, about 19 per cent.; on the sea- 

 level plan, about 16 per cent. In the 

 roundest kind of round numbers, this leaves 

 about 185,000,000 yards still to be exca- 

 vated for a sea-level canal ; 140,000,000 for 

 the thirty-foot level; 110,000,000 for the 



