day have been forcibly detained at some part of the passage during twenty or five and twenty days consecutively. To these conclusive reasons, it would not be difficult to add others; but these must be sufficient to warn unbiassed minds against the indirect passage. The inconveniences, or rather the impossibilities of the indirect track, become more striking when compared with the conditions of the direct track and its incontestable advantages. 1st. To begin with, the direct track is only about one third the length of the other. That would be 400 _kilometres_ long, and the direct track is only 155, which would be reduced to 120, as will be seen. Near about the middle of the Isthmus, the Bitter Lakes are met with, which give 18 _kilometres_ of navigation ready made, and not requiring a single turn of the shovel, as the Viceroy’s engineers say, and 18 _kilometres_ in addition are three parts excavated by nature itself; 120 _kilometres_ therefore remain, that is to say, 30 leagues at the most. 2nd. The direct track is the easiest. There are only two salient points in the entire Isthmus that it is necessary to traverse by partly turning them; one, the Serapeum, which, according to the levels checked in 1853, is 16 _met._, 5950 high; and the other El Guisr, which is 11 _met._, 6300. With the depth of the Canal, this would make a cutting of 20 or at most 24 _metres_ at some points. There is certainly nothing in such a work to terrify our engineers. 3rd. The direct track is the most natural. The Isthmus is traversed by a longitudinal depression, formed by the meeting of the two plains descending with an imperceptible slope, the one from Egypt, the other from the frontier hills of Asia. The Bitter Lakes, filled with the waters of the Arabian Gulf by the action of the tides only, may easily form a reservoir which, with a surface of 280,000,000 _square metres_ by a rise of 2 _metres_ of moving waters, would not receive less than 560,000,000 _cubic metres_, for the service of the Canal, below the water line at the level of the two Seas. Lake Timsah, situated at about an equal distance from Suez and Pelusium, is like an inland port where ships can be revictualled and repaired. Moreover, by another favour of nature, towards Lake Timsah a second not less remarkable hollow abuts perpendicularly on the longitudinal depression, it is that of the Wady-Tomilat (the fertile Goshen of the Bible). This hollow still receives the overflowings of the Nile for a great part of its length, and forms the natural track of a communication starting from the river and joining, at the central part of the Isthmus, the line of maritime navigation which would be established between the Arabian Gulf and the Mediterranean.