Two points present themselves offering great facilities for the execution of a ship canal. The one is in the immediate vicinity of Panama; where the many imperfect observations which have hitherto been made, are yet sufficient to leave no doubt that, as the distance is comparatively short, the summit levels are inconsiderable, and the supply of water ample. The other is some distance to the northward. The isthmus is there broader, but is in part occupied by the large and deep fresh-water lakes of Nicaragua and Naragua. The lake of Nicaragua communicates with the Atlantic by a copious river, which may either be rendered navigable, or be made the source of supply for a side canal. The space between the two lakes is of inconsiderable extent, and presents no great engineering difficulties. The elevation of the lake of Naragua above the Pacific is inconsiderable; there is no hill range between it and the gulph of Canchagua; and Captain Sir Edward Belcher carried his surveying ship _Sulphur_ sixty miles up the Estero Real, which rises near the lake, and falls into the gulf. The line of the Panama canal presents, as Humboldt remarks, facilities equal to those of the line of the Caledonian canal. The Nicaragua line is not more difficult than that of the canal of Languedoc, a work executed between 1660 and 1682, at a time when the commerce to be expedited by it did not exceed—if it equalled—that which will find its way across the Isthmus; when great part of the maritime country was as thinly inhabited by as poor a population as the Isthmus now is; and when the last subsiding storms of civil war, and the dragonnades of Louis XIV., unsettled men’s minds and made person and property insecure. The cosmopolitan effects of such an undertaking, if prosecuted to a successful close, it is impossible even approximatively to estimate. The acceleration it will communicate to the already rapid progress of civilisation in the Pacific is obvious. And no less obvious are the beneficial effects it will have upon the mutual relations of civilised states, seeing that the recognition of the independence and neutrality in times of general war of the canal and the region through which it passes, is indispensable to its establishment.