The attitude of the majority of the board of consulting engineers upon this most important question is best shown by an extract from its report. “The United States Government is proposing to expend many millions of dollars for the construction of this great waterway which is to serve the commerce of the world for all time and the very existence of which would depend upon the permanent stability and unquestioned safety of all dams. The board is therefore of the opinion that the existence of such costly facilities for the world’s commerce should not depend upon great reservoirs held by earth embankments resting literally upon mud foundations or those of even sand and gravel. The board is unqualifiedly of opinion that no such vast and doubtful experiment should be indulged in, but, on the contrary, that every work of whatever nature should be so designed and built as to include only those features which experience has demonstrated to be positively safe and efficient”. The remarkable diversity of statement in regard to this dam is shown by the following quotations. Mr. Teller in a speech in the last session of Congress said in part, “Let me say a word or two about the great dam to be built at Gatun. We were told in the beginning that the engineers would find a foundation upon which they could build a safe dam. The French Government declared they had found such a foundation; our own engineers declared they had found it. It turned out that they had struck some floating pieces of rock in the mud, and when they had gone down 287 feet they found the same conditions practically that they found in the first 50 feet. The place where it is proposed to construct this dirt dam, which will be half a mile wide and 135 feet high (now 115 feet), is a great swamp. No such dam has ever been built in the history of the world, and the engineers of the world, with few exceptions, have declared it cannot be built. The dam at Gatun is to be built upon a foundation of doubtful safety, and there is not an engineer in the country who does not know that it is doubtful”. Lindon W. Bates, in his “Retrieval at Panama”, says, “The utter indifference to real information as to existing conditions at Panama has been astounding. Despite, for instance, the private knowledge of the Commission in 1906 through their last 15 months that the bores in these Gatun gorges were flowing bores, not one additional test had been undertaken in them. In summary of foundation conditions one thing is certain. First and foremost and indispensibly there must be at the Isthmus, since the underground conditions have been revealed, the safe barring off of permeable strata under the crucial dam. This cannot be done at Gatun for the high dam”.