THE WORLD HERE AND THERE,

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Short Cats across the Globe.

O a person who wishes to sail to California an inspection of the map of the world reveals a provoking peculiarity. The Atlantic Ocean—the highway of the globe-being separated from the Pacific by the great western continent, it is impossible to sail to the opposite coasts without going thousands of miles out of his way; for he must double Cape Horn. Yet a closer inspection of the map will discover that but for one little barrier of land, which is in size but as a grain of sand to the bed of an ocean, the passage would be direct. Were it not for that small neck of land, the Isthmus of Panama, (which narrows in one place to twenty-eight miles) he might save a voyage of from six to eight thousand miles, and pass at once into the Pacific Ocean. Again, if his desires tend towards the East, he perceives that but for the Isthmus of Suez, he would not be obliged to double the Cape of Good Hope. The Eastern difficulty has been partially obviated by the overland route opened up by the ill-rewarded Waghorn. The western barrier has yet to be broken through.

Now that we can shake hands with Brother Jonathan in twelve days by means of weekly steamers; travel from one end of Great Britain to another, or from the Hudson to the Ohio, as fast as the wind, and make our words dance to distant friends upon the magic tight wire a great deal faster-now that the European and Columbian Saxon is spreading his children more or less over all the known habitable world: it seems extraordinary that the simple expedient of opening a twenty-eight mile passage between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, to save a dangerous voyage of some eight thousand miles, has not been already achieved. In this age of enterprise that so simple a remedy for so great an evil should not have been applied appears astonishing. Nay, we ought to feel some shame when we reflect that evidences in the neighbourhood of both Isthmuses exist of such junctions having existed, in what we are pleased to designate 'barbarous' ages.

Does nature present insurmountable engineering difficulties to the Panama scheme? By no means: for after the Croton aqueduct, our own railway tunnelling and the Britannia tubular bridge, engineering difficulties have become obsolete. Are the levels of the Pacific and the Gulph of Mexico, which should be joined, so different, that if one were admitted the fall would inundate the surrounding country? Not at all. Hear Humboldt on these points.

Forty years ago he declared it to be his firm opinion that 'the Isthmus of Panama is suited to the formation of an oceanic canal

-one with fewer sluices than the Caledonian Canal-capable of affording an unimpeded passage, at all seasons of the year, to vessels of that class which sail between New York and Liverpool, and between Chili and California." In the recent edition of his Views of Nature,' he sees no reason to alter the views he has

always entertained on this subject.' Engineers, both British and American, have confirmed this opinion by actual survey. As, then, combination of British skill, capital, and energy, with that of the most 'go-ahead' people upon earth, have been dormant, whence the secret of the delay? The answer at once allays astonishment :-Till the present time, the speculation would not have 'paid.'

Large works of this nature, while they create an inconceivable development of commerce, must have a certain amount of a trading population to begin upon. A gold-beater can cover the effigy of a man on horseback with a sovereign; but he must have the sovereign first. It was not merely because the full power of the iron rail to facilitate the transition of heavy burdens had not been estimated, and because no Stephenson had constructed a 'Rocket engine,' that a railway with steam locomotives was not made from London to Liverpool before 1836. Until the intermediate traffic between these termini had swelled to a sufficient amount in quantity and value to bear reimbursement for establishing such a mode of conveyance, its execution would have been impossible, even though men had known how to set about it.

What has been the condition of the countries under consideration? In 1839, the entire population of the tropical American isthmus, in the states of Central America and New Grenada, did not exceed three millions. The number of the inhabitants of pure European descent did not exceed one hundred thousand. It was only among this inconsiderable fraction that anything like wealth, intelligence, and enterprise, akin to that of Europe, was to be found; the rest were poor and ignorant aboriginals and mixed races, in a state of scarcely demi-civilisation. Throughout this thinly-peopled and poverty-stricken region, there was neither