It is singular that the Tartarus of Virgil and Dante is cast in this very region; but it would then have been no fabled terrors: natural objects would have outstripped their fancies. The breath of this furnace would not have been pent up in its caverns, but have spread its blight over the finest regions of Africa, Europe, and Asia, blasting in their bud the glories of the Capitol, the eloquence of the Bema, the sculptures of the Parthenon, the trophies of the Memnonium, the enterprise of Tyre, and the wealth of Carthage; and these fair and fertile shores would have been a wilderness, overhanging an abyss of death. The Chinese, the Hindoo, or, perchance, the Seminole philosopher, would have been journeying here to visit the bowels of the earth laid open to the sun. What observations and experiments to make on the converse phenomena to ours--on the increase of intensity of heat and pressure on the powers of men or animals! What speculations on the old orders of the animal and vegetable kingdoms under new conditions! What new ones called into existence! What magnetic and electric phenomena to reward the Empedocles who ventured into this crater of 4,000 miles circumference! Imagine Lebanon or Etna rising 30,000 or 60,000 feet, and Cyprus, a plateau, suspended a mile and a half above the plain of burning salt or boiling brine! What treasures for the historian--the exuviæ of animals and men--the refuse of centuries washed down by the streams--the dead of extinguished races buoyed up and floating through each other in the brine, or caught and cured in the salt as the mammoth in the ice! The geologist would then have enjoyed the sight of strata unmodified by a retiring deluge, and feasted his eyes on the reality of chaos, and an earth fitted for salamanders, megalosauri, cheirotheria, and mastodons. The Simoon would have extended its empire from the Zahara to the plains of Languedoc, and, cherished by his breath, the locust would have asserted her sway up to the English sea. Such, horrid and inane, must have been the “sweet south,” had not this channel been dug, and this purple sea poured in--reflecting the heavens above,--dispensing around moisture to the fields, health to the people,--yielding its body to their keels, its breezes to their sails. For this were these portals opened, which man so long has deemed a mystery denying his scrutiny, and a barrier defying his adventure. FOOTNOTES: