the year is 246 at Bohio (inland on the Atlantic side), 196 at Colon, and 141 at Panama. The reader must not imagine a perpetual downpour or drizzle. The rain comes down in thundering tropical cataracts, leaving spaces of fine weather between the storms. Still, the isthmus is undoubtedly rainy and damp, and it is this humidity which makes the climate so trying, though the variations of the thermometer are by no means extreme and the average air temperature not particularly high. For example, the average temperature at Panama ranges from 81.6 Fahrenheit in November to 86.1 in March--that is, during the hottest time of the day, from two to four o'clock p.m. The coolest time is from six to seven a.m., when the average temperature ranges between 74.0 in January to 76.6 in June. The yearly average daily temperature is 79.6. The thermometer seems never to have recorded 100 degrees Fahrenheit at Panama, whereas 104 has been touched even at Washington. But to return to the Chagres River. The tropical rains convert this stream very quickly into a raging torrent. The Chagres is capable of rising over forty feet in twenty-four hours. If the Chagres valley was to be the site of the canal, as was obviously necessary, how did the French propose to "care for" this tremendous and capricious flow of water? Mr. Johnson remarks that "those who have seen the antics of the Chagres under the stress of a characteristic isthmian rain must be pardoned if they regard the harnessing of the Chagres to the canal as something much like the harnessing of a mad elephant to a family carriage." The only course open to the French with their sea-level project was to divert the Chagres with its twenty-six tributaries, chief of which are the Gatun and the Trinidad, from its old valley into another channel, along which it could rage as it pleased on its short journey to the Caribbean. This would have been a tremendous, though probably not an impossible, task. The New Panama Company, which took the French work from the Lesseps Company in 1893, dropped the tide-level in favour of a lock or high-level canal, and adopted the plan of a dam across the river valley at Bohio, creating a lake above this point and discharging the flood waters to the level below by means of a spillway in the adjacent hills. We shall see later how the Americans adopted the same principle but modified it in practice.