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VOL. XXXV. CLEVELAND. MAY 16, 1907. No. 20 IN PRAISE OF THE DREDGER. An absorbingly interesting paper on "The Panama Canal" was read by M. Philippe Bunau-Varilla, at the Society of Arts, on? Jan. 23. Haying claimed that a straits of Panama was what ought to be constructed, he proceeded to discuss the means of making it. It was not sufficient, he said, to define the ideal type of communication be- tween the oceans; it must also be prac- tically realizable. Now, with the means generally employel, with those used by the company presided over by M. de Lesseps during almost the entire duration of its existence, with those employed by the second Panama com- pany, the new company, with those that the American government was employing at the present day, such a conception was radically chimerical. In the three cases auoted the organ of excavation was the excavator or steam _ shovel, rolling on rails; the organ of transportation and dumping of the spoils was the car, rolling on rails. With this method, the method in the dry, the difficulties caused by the dilu- vian rain, in the preservation of the railroad tracks, were enormous. It was necessary for a relatively feeble production to have a considerable num- ber of workmen 1n constant attend- ance. Accidents and running off the rails occurred incessantly, because in a vast excavation work the tracks often had to be shifted to follow the ter- races. Consequently they could neither be well fixed, nor well ballasted, nor well drained. 'These necessities, com- bined with the brusque and violent tropical rain, the bad quality of the workmanship in that country where depression and fever were rife, and the clayish and slippery nature of the soil of the isthmus, ended in running off the rail, in accidents which occurred over and over again, and which were the great, the only and the essential difficulty of the excavation of the Pa- nama canal. : The estimates prepared by the isth- mian canal commission, the American official authority entrusted with the execution of the Panama canal, gave, in September, 1905, as the cost of the sea-level canal excavated in the dry, the following figure, $321,779,731. This valuation comprised $7,000,000 for the tidal locks, and $10.394,794 for the ma- sonry walls at Culebra, an erroneous conception, since entirely abandoned. It might, therefore, be said that by. overlooking these two elements of the work, the estimated cost of digging a lockless sea-leve! canal, 35 ft. deep and 150 ft: wide, was, in 1905, in round fig- ures, $300,000,000. These figures were arrived at by the official American commission after six years of study, and two years of effective work under its own management in the isthmus. The length of time for the execution of this canal was estimated at more than twenty years by the commission in 1901, and in 1905 one might con- clude from the documents. of the com- mission that 't allowed twenty-two years. ' The volume of the excavations to be extracted for the sea-level canal thus conceived, having 35 ft. depth below mean level from th: origin on the At- lantic to Miraflores, K. 62, an 45 ft. 'depth below mean level from Mira- flores to the Pacific end, K. 75, with 150 feet bottom width, lateral slopes of 45 degrees and bermes of 50 ft. on each side of the canal at 10 ft. above the water, was 205,000,000 cubic yards. The volume of the navigable highway that 'he. had called the "Straits of Fanania," with: an average depth of 50 ft. below mean tide (45 at Colon, 55 at Fanama), the width at the bottom being 500 ft., slopes at 45 degrees, and bermes of 100 ft. on each side, was about 600 00,000 cubic yards. The completion of the "Straits" would necessitate, roughly speaking, an out- lay three times greater than that of the sea-level canal. According to the isthmian canal commission's own fig- ures, it would be necessary to spend $900,000,000, and io wait about 60 to 70 years to see the first vessel pass through it. Such figures explained sufficiently why the rational and com- plete solution of the Panama problem, the opening of a waterway unobstruct- ed by locks, having free openings on the two oceans suificiently wide to al- low ships to navigate and to pass each other without being inconvenienced by the tidal and fluvial currents, had never been examined or discussed before September, 1905, when he submitted it to the international consulting board which met at Washington.- If he acted thus, is was not for the vain satisfac- tion of fixing a theoretical and chimer- ical term to the efforts of the engi- neers. In showing them the enviable and desirable end he showed at the same time the practical way to reach it.. Since 1879, when the first interna-. tional congress was assembled by M. de Lesseps, until 1905, when the last one was assembled by Mr. Roosevelt, all the numerous commis- sions by whom the Panama canal was discussed, had, without exception, for- gotten one thing. That was the most important, the essential question--the mode of execution. Alt these commissions had admitted as implicit truth, as an axiom, that the Panama canal would be excavated dry. They then discussed the maximum and minimum form compatible with this mode of execution from. the narrow level canal closed by tidal locks on the Pacific side to the lock canal with a summit level,;more or less high, in the center of the isthmus. Now that particular mode of execution was not the only one as' the various commis- sions had thought. The excavation, transportation, and dumping might be