ment on the side of the canal. The ladder over which the buckets travel is raised or lowered by a mammoth crane and swung from side to side by guys worked on steam winches, so that the buckets can excavate at any angle. Each dredge excavates about fifteen cubic yards of earth a minute. Working abreast the two dredges named cut the canal, as they proceeded, to its full width, 280 feet. However, they cut only seventeen feet below the surface of the water, and as the required depth of water in the canal is twenty-eight feet, the remaining eleven feet will be cut by other dredges following behind these. About one mile of the canal had been opened at the close of 1891. At the same time about nine miles of the canal clearing had been made through the forest on the Pacific side of the lake.

A brief glance at the canal route in its entirety, before proceeding to consider the work remaining to be done, will give the reader a more comprehensive grasp of the subject. The distance from Greytown to Brito, the Pacific terminus of the canal, is 169 miles. The actual

excavation required, however, is only 26 miles, of which 15 miles are between Greytown and the San Juan River, and 11 miles between the lake and the Pacific. The distance traversed by the canal to the San Juan is 313 miles, of which 16 will be through artificial lakes or basins. The course of the canal between the lake and the Pacific will also be through an artificial lake 5 miles long. For the major part of the distance between the two oceans, sixty-five miles of river and fifty-six miles of lake navigation will be utilized. Three locks, within thirteen miles of the Atlantic, will lift the canal 106 feet above the level of the ocean, and the natural incline of the river, which is three-fourths of an inch per mile from the lake to the point of junction, will raise it to the summit level, 110 feet. Three locks within 3 miles of the Pacific will lower it to that ocean. Thus the summit level of the canal will be 1531 miles long.

Although a work of great magnitude, no insuperable engineering difficulties are presented anywhere along the route. The hardest part of the work lies in the eastern and San Francisco.

divisions. The eastern division extends 18% miles, from Greytown harbor to the western end of the eastern divide cut, and the San Francisco division, 12 miles, through the basin of a river of that name, from the cut to the San Juan. For 9 miles, from Greytown harbor to the first lock, situated in the foothills of the eastern divide, the course of the canal is southwest across the flat alluvial coast lands, where the excavation will be made entirely by the floating dredges. This section of the canal, which will preserve the sea level, will have a surface width of 280 feet, a bottom width of 120 feet, a depth of twenty-eight feet and a waterway cross section of 5,712 square feet, or 2,012 square feet more than the cross section of the Suez Canal. All of the locks on the canal will be 650 feet long, eighty feet wide, and capable of receiving at the same time two vessels of 2,500 tons each. Lock No. 1 will have a lift of thirty-one feet; Lock 2, situated 14 miles further west, will have a lift of thirty feet, and Lock 3,2 miles beyond the second, a lift of forty-five feet. Between Locks 1 and 2, the canal will be carried through an artificial basin

formed by damming the valley of a little stream, called the Deseado. A second basin is created by embankments above Lock 2, while above Lock 3 is formed an artificial lake about three miles long and from thirty to seventy feet deep. In the first two basins some excavation will be necessary in places to secure the required depth, but these, like the third, will afford ample room for the passage of ships in opposite directions.

The heaviest cutting along the whole line is through the eastern divide, at the western end of the artificial lake just spoken of. The ridge to be pierced, a spur of the main Cordillera, is 2.9 miles wide, and at its crest, which is, however, a mere "backbone," 298 feet above the level of the canal. The average cutting through the ridge is 141 feet to the floor of the canal, and it constitutes twenty-one per cent. of all the excavation required on the work. Excepting a comparatively thin overlying layer of earth, the material to be excavated is rock, which is indispensable in the construction of the breakwaters at Greytown, and the Ochoa and other dams in close proximity to the divide.

The labor involved can be greatly economized by utilizing ample water-power, near at hand on either side of the cutting, for driving the excavating machinery, furnishing electric lights, etc. West of the divide cut a series of embankments converting the connecting valleys of the Limpio, Chanchos and San Francisco, the Florida lagoon, and the valley of the Machado, into an artificial lake 12 miles long, constitute the San Francisco division, which takes the canal into the San Juan River, immediately above the Ochoa Dam. This dam, which is to be built across the San Juan River, between two lofty hills, is to be 1,900 feet long and seventy feet high. It will raise the water of the river fifty-six feet, or to within four feet of the level of Lake Nicaragua, and afford slack water navigation to the lake. Some minor embankments will also have to be built across gaps in the impounding hills of the San Carlos, the Costa Rican tributary of the San Juan, which it joins a few miles above the Ochoa Dam. The San Carlos is the river which brings down from the Costa Rican mountains the silt that closed up the harbor of Greytown. The Ochoa Dam