The Vermont watchman. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1883-1911, 1883-07-25

can desert which are known to be lower |
than the surface of the sea whose assist |
ance is to be invoked to rehabilitate the |
adjacent regions with their pristine ver-
dure and productiveness. In these basins,
conjectured to be the beds of great in
land seas long since extinct, another sea
will be created. The environing ranges
of mountains will afford the agencies for
condensing the evaporation and precipi-
tating upon parched and desert wastes
the rainfall that shall change them
into fertile fields. His achievements
and projects which are less vision
airy than his greatest achievement, the
Suez canal scheme, was thought to be,
the marvellous activity he exhibits under
his more than three score years and ten,
the skill he displays in difficult diplo-
matte, no less than in great engineering
problems, all rank DeLesseps as one of
the most astonishing creations of an age
that has produced men who have pushed
tunnels through mountains and under the
bed of ocean, bridged streams that have
defied mans skill and daring since the
creation and, who have developed and uti
lized the miraculous powers of electricity.
Commerce seems to have sinister de-
signs upon the necks of peninsulas and
continents wherever these narrow strips
of land interpose barrier to the passage
of its argosies. To the project to make
the ancient Peloponnesus an island by
cutting a water way across the isthmus of
Corinth, allusion las been made. A
scheme is discussed for uniting the waters
of the Bay of Biscay and the Mediter-
ranean by a canal across southeastern
France; the North Sea with the Baltic
by cutting Denmark from its continental
mornings; for severing Scotland from
England by trench from Tyne to Sol
way Firth for making Manchester a
seaport town by digging ship canal to
the sea for shortening the route from
East Indian ports to the coast of China
by amputating the Malay peninsula.
Similar enterprises engage attention on
this continent. Besides the Panama canal,
there is the much mooted Nicaragua route
between the Atlantic and Pacific, and
Captain Fades ship railway further north,
across Tehauntepec. More promising
than any of these is the scheme of the
Florida Ship Canal company, recently or
ganized and numbering among its officers
and stockholders men of eminence in the
affairs of this pushing land. The cost is
estimated at thirty million dollars. The
stock, it is said, has all been subscribed,
engineers engaged and the work will be
under contract by the first of September.
General Charles p. Stone, union soldier
and until recently chief of staff to the
Khedive of Egypt, is chief engineer of the
company. The proposed route leaves the
st. Johns river about twenty miles above
Jacksonville, strikes directly for the
| Suwanee river and follows that stream to
the Gulf of Mexico, making an open tide
water route, without locks, less than one
hundred miles in length and deep enough
to float the largest ships. 1t will shorten
by several hundred miles the distance
from the great ports of the gulf states
to the markets of the Atlantic coast
and avoid the dangers that threaten YES
sells off the south shore of Florida. 1t is
| ba1, hot +hia ho ca -,
three years. From the days of Cotton
Mather commercial surgeons have had
their eyes on the gaunt arm that crooks
out from the eastern coast of Massachu-
sets. 1t has however escaped to this day
the rude surgery OF the canal diggers, but
we believe the matter of uniting the
waters of Cape Cod and Buzzard bays has
been before the Massachusetts legislature
at its present session. Shipowners have
long been impatient of the land barrier
between Chesapeake and Delaware bays.
Congress has often been appealed to to
assist in uniting the waters of these great
arms of the ocean to provide an unruffied
water way from Norfolk to Albermarle,
past the stormy capes, and to encourage
the wedding of the waters of the Missis-
sippi and the great lakes by helping to
build the Hennepin canal. These and
other similar schemes have been more or
less conspicuously before the public. The
increasing commerce of the world, the
shortening up of all other old time means of
communication, the necessity of proper.
tionate and reasonable despatch in order
to maintain the preference which their
comparative cheapness secures for water
freights, will unquestionably compel the
construction, sooner or later, of some OF
these projected canals and of others which
have not been named.