the weight of the bank causes the underlying material to snap off and give way like an overloaded floor-beam. In each of these cases, about eighty acres of ground sank almost straight down to an average depth of twenty feet. Squeezed between its sinking banks, the bottom of the Canal naturally rose up, forming first an island, then a peninsula, and finally a complete barrier. As fast as the dredges dug this away, more material came down from each side, in regular waves. The tops of these slides were too broken to permit of their being lightened by steam-shovels, nor could anything be done by washing the earth down the side of the slope away from the Cut, with powerful hydraulic nozzles, as was possible at Cucaracha. The only course was to keep the dredges digging away, till there was nothing more left for them to dig. It was not until April, 1916, that the Canal was reopened to commerce.
Because of these slides and also because of the great war in Europe, which made impossible the assembling of an international fleet, there was no formal opening of the Panama Canal by the President of the United States. In somewhat the same way, the elaborate festivities in celebration of the opening of the Suez Canal were cut short forty-five years earlier, by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War.
