course of rivers and highlands dividing the waters which flow into the
Atlantic Ocean from those which flow into the St. Lawrence. It took
twenty years to find out which river was the true St. Croix, that being
the starting point. England then having made the extraordinary discovery
that the Bay of Fundy is not a part of the Atlantic Ocean, forty years
more were passed in the unsuccessful attempt to re-create the highlands
which this strange theory had annihilated; and just as the two countries
were on the verge of a war, the controversy was settled by compromise.
Had the boundary been accurately described by lines of latitude and
longitude, no dispute could have arisen. No dispute arose as to the
boundary between the United States and Spain, and her successor, Mexico,
where it runs through untrodden deserts and over pathless mountains
along the 42d degree of latitude. The identity of rivers may be
disputed, as in the case of the St. Croix; the course of mountain chains
is too broad for a dividing line; the division of streams, as experience
has shown, is uncertain; but a degree of latitude is written on the
heavenly sphere, and nothing but an observation is required to read the
record.


QUESTIONS OF BOUNDARY.

But scientific elements, like sharp instruments, must be handled with
scientific accuracy. A part of our boundary between the British
Provinces ran upon the forty-fifth degree of latitude; and about forty
years ago, an expensive fortress was commenced by the government of the
United States, at Rouse's Point, on Lake Champlain, on a spot intended
to be just within our limits. When a line came to be more carefully
surveyed, the fortress turned out to be on the wrong side of the line;
we had been building an expensive fortification for our neighbor. But in