Having first visited the Canal works at the beginning of 1907, I decided to make upon the spot a careful examination of the whole undertaking. For this purpose I visited Washington and made application through the proper channel to the Department of State, which kindly consented to further the inquiry. A set of the published documents was supplied to me, and I proceeded from New York to the Isthmus by the R.M.S.P. _Magdalena_, arriving at Colon April 12, 1908. Here Colonel Goethals, chairman of the Isthmian Canal Commission, provided me with a letter to those concerned to furnish all information, and proposed that I should make my way about unattended and pursue my inquiries independently. I was thus enabled to converse with perfect freedom with the rank and file, while drawing freely on the special information possessed only by the heads of departments. For the benefit of readers in England I may explain that these circumstances were to me of especial importance on account of the doubts thrown by American writers, and also by Americans of repute in conversation, upon the reliability of official and other information supplied to the American public on the burning topic of the Isthmus. As an Englishman, and therefore standing outside American party politics, and as a scientific student not engaged in commerce or political life, I came to the study of the subject without prepossessions. This at least was my happy state when I arrived in Washington in March last. When I left for the Canal Zone a month later I was filled with gloomy forebodings that I might after all find a rotten state of affairs on the Isthmus. It was with intense relief that I found that I had what is called in America "an honest proposition" to deal with. As my doubts hitherto had been due to the patriotic anxiety of their compatriots, I am sure Colonel Goethals and his colleagues will forgive me for this frank statement of my difficulties and their solution. Any Englishman, accustomed to see the work of our own soldiers and civil servants in the Crown Colonies or in Egypt, would recognise in the officers of the corps of Engineers and of the Army Medical Corps who are in charge of the Canal Zone men of a like high standard of duty. As this account is written not only for my own countrymen but also for readers on the other side of the Atlantic, I should be glad, if it be possible, to convince of my own _bona-fides_ those anxious patriots who find it difficult to believe any good report from Panama. It may tend in this direction to state that I travelled and sojourned at my own charges, and that I went out on an independent inquiry. That I had promised to give an account of the Canal works to my brother geographers in London was my only undertaking, and the acceptance of a free pass on the Panama Railway my only financial obligation either in Washington or on the Isthmus.