It is not that the canal is unique in point of the expenditure involved, or in so far as the engineering problems to be dealt with are concerned. The Suez Canal is at once a much more costly and a much more extensive work, its actual cost having been about 20,000,000_l._ sterling, as against less than half that sum for the Manchester enterprise; and its length having been about 100 miles, as against 35. The Panama Canal, again, although approximately about the same length as the ship canal between Manchester and the sea, has cost, up to the present time, about 60,000,000_l._ sterling, including the expenditure on financing. The Nicaraguan Canal, again, which is now about to be undertaken in real earnest, is estimated to cost from 13,000,000_l._ to 20,000,000_l._, and will involve the cutting of some 28 miles of canal, in addition to the almost equally serious work of canalising the St. Juan River. But these are all works of a different character, and having a different object in view. The Suez, Panama, Nicaraguan, and Corinth Canals are isthmian waterways, intended, or constructed with the view of connecting together seas or oceans that Nature had divorced, and thereby carried out with the primary, if not with the sole, object of abridging distance. The Welland and the St. Mary’s Falls Canals, in Canada and the United States, are of much the same character, their object being that of uniting waters that were originally kept apart by natural barriers. But the Manchester Ship Canal has but few antetypes. The canals already in existence that most nearly correspond to it in character are the Erie Canal, which connects Buffalo with New York, and thereby secures an unbroken line of water communication between Chicago and New York, a distance of over 1000 miles; and the Poutiloff Canal, 38 miles in length, which connects Cronstadt with St. Petersburg, and has converted the latter city into a seaport. The design of the Manchester Ship Canal is to transform that large centre of population and industry from a landlocked city into a seaport, and to confer the same facilities on a number of other towns in the neighbourhood.