Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 by Various
page 54 of 144 (37%)
page 54 of 144 (37%)
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Therefore, the idea of an interoceanic canal is by no means a modern
one, as travelers and navigators observed that there was a great depression among the hills of the Isthmus of Panama. As Professor T.E. Nurse, of the U.S.N., says in his memoirs: "This problem of interoceanic communication has been justly said to possess not only practical value, but historical grandeur. It clearly links itself back to the era of the conquest of Cortez, three and a half centuries." [1] It is a problem which has been left for our modern era to solve, but nevertheless its history is thereby rendered still more interesting, having needed so many centuries to bring it to an issue. [Footnote 1: From Prof. Nurse's historical essay. See Survey of Nicaragua Canal, by Com. Lull.] Spain, which acquired through her Columbus a new empire, lying near, as it was supposed, to the riches of Asia, could not be indifferent, from the moment of her discoveries, to the means of crossing these lands to yet richer ones beyond. India, from the days of Alexander and of the geographers, Mela, Strabo, and Ptolemy, was the land of promise, the home of the spices, the inexhaustible fountain of wealth. The old routes of commerce thither had been closed one by one to the Christians; the overland trade had fallen into the hands of the Arabs; and at the fall of Constantinople, 1453, the commerce of the Black Sea and of the Bosphorus, the last of the old routes to the East, finally failed the Christian world. Yet even beyond the fame of the East, which tradition had brought down from Greek and Roman, much more had the crusaders kindled for Asia (Cathay) and its riches an ardor not easily suppressed in men's minds. |
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