Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/441

150,000. The cost of the government of the Canal Zone, estimated at $100,000 is not included in these figures. Relating to dimensions, and other features of various canals, data were presented in tabular form, in part as here reproduced.

Existing and Proposed Canals

* Approximate.

The enlargement of the Suez Canal is not jet complete. The total length of the Suez Canal is 104.8 statute miles, of which about 10 miles are in lake, leaving the length of the excavated channel 94.76 miles.

The total length of the Kiel Canal is 60.89 miles, of which 3 miles are in lakes. Where two sets of figures are noted for the area of the cross-section, one applies to low, the other to high water.

General Davis shows that the proposed sea-level canal will not be dangerous, narrow or contracted, because this is not true of the Suez Canal, which is longer, narrower and shallower, and has more abrupt bends than the canal proposed by the majority of the engineers. He calls attention to the fact that in the opinion of very able engineers the cost in time will be but slightly more for the channel at ocean level, than for a canal with a summit level at 85 feet; and he says:

It is certain that the cost in money of the simple low-level channel in which every existing and projected vessel would find convenient passage, will cost some tens of millions more than the complicated high-level structures, but the former will closely approach and ultimately result in the ideal, simple natural waterway . . . while the latter will stand for the opposite until heroic measures are resorted to and the objectionable structures are removed, for the idea of transformability is eliminated by the majority.

Col. Oswald H. Ernst, of the Engineer Corps, U. S. Army, a member of the canal commission of 1905, said in part:

I have made a very careful review of the arguments presented on both sides, as exhibited in these two reports which you have before you—the majority and the minority reports—and I am satisfied that the United States will get a