THE PANAMA CANAL.

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 52, 29 August 1925, Page 24

THE PANAMA CANAL.

Before the Americans took over the rights of the Flench Caiial Company in 1904 there was keen controversy among engineers over the rival plans for cutting through the Isthmus of Panama. Ie tho end America decided in favour of a highlevel canal, involving locks of colossal proportions. Despite the success of the canal, with its elaborate system of lockage, . the alternative plan of a waterway at sea.-level still found supporters, and prominent among them was the French engineer, M-. Phillippe Bunau-Varilla, who has been writing in its favour since 1892. Slowly the idea has made its way in the United States, arid oarly in this year M. Bunau-Varilla, in a speech at Cincinnati, created .a sensation by his plan for converting the existing canal to a sea-level waterway. This, he declared, could be done without the loss of an additional dollar, because of the immediate growth of revenue, and also without interrupting navigation for a single day. The speech made such an impression that it has been printed in the "Congressional Record," the official publication of the United States. By making use of the present waterway for transport of machinery, material, and so on, it is believed that in less than twenty years a waterway could be made, 300. yards wide^- and affording unobstructed communication between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The surplus waters of. the Ohagres River and its tributaries would be carried .in artificial channels by the side of the main canal to the Pacific.