the possibility of spanning those few leagues by a canal is among the unsolved problems of modern science. Every motive that could whet the cupidity, or excite the curiosity of explorers, has tempted the traveler's research—tales of Indian cities buried in the depths of the forests; of natural canals, along which the native dongos passed from sea to sea; the known mineral wealth of the country, and the desire of the most powerful monarchs of Europe for its exploration —but all have failed to make us acquainted with the interior of Central America. The Spanish conguistadores, the bold buccaneers who made their haunts among the creeks and lagoons of the Mosquito Coast, from the days of Drake and Hawkins down to those of Lafitte, and the restless Yankees themselves, who, for the last twenty-one years, have been seeking a shorter passage between California and the Atlantic than the long voyage around the Horn —all have been, so far, baffled by this mystery-covered land; and now, three hundred and sixty years after De Nufiez bore the standard of Castile into the tide of the Pacific, and claimed its shores and islands as the heritage of his sovereign, we are anxiously waiting the result of the Darien Survey, to know whether the narrow isthmus offers any insurmountable obstacle to "the meeting of the waters" of the two oceans. Since then, the world has been circumnavigated, for the first time in history; Australia, New Zealand, and the countless groups of the Pacific have been discovered; the Nile has revealed its sources to the courage of a Speke; the fong-hidden Niger has been traced to its mouth by Park and Lander; Ross has explored the shores of the Antarctic Continent, and McClure solved the problem of the North-west Passage; but still the few hundred square miles of the Isthmus of Darien remain a ¢erra incognita to modern science.
A brief experience in the exploration of the Central American forests, however, soon removes any astonishment that one may feel at the little progress that has been hitherto made in ascertaining the conformation of the country. The difficulties thrown in the way of the explorer, by*the arid deserts of Africa or Australia, dwindle to insignificance in comparison with those presented by the inexhaustible fertility of Nature in the gorgeous lands of tropical America. Buffon has remarked that while animal life displays its greatest variety and vigor in the Old World, it is in the New that Nature puts forth her greatest wealth of vegetation; and no one who has ever had occasion to force his way through the forests of Central America will feel disposed to question the accuracy of the last part of the assertion, at least. The rank luxuriance of vegetable life, unless constantly checked, obliterates the works of human industry as surely, and almost as rapidly, as the tide sweeps away impressions on the sands of the shore; and under the enervating influence of the climate, and without the stimulus to exertion which a more barren soil, and the fear of want, supply in less-favored lands, man feels little disposed to maintain the contest with Nature. Locating a road, or making a survey in the jungles of Central America, is a very different thing from running the boundary lines of a Government Survey @a a Western prairie. The thickness of the underwood and matted creepers, through which it is impossible for even an Indian to force his way without the aid of his machete; the wonderful vigor of vegetable growth, which, in the rainy season, seems to put forth a new forest almost as fast as the old is cut away; the slowness with which the most energetic efforts advance under the influence of a tropical climate; the total separation from men involved by a journey of even a few miles into the primeval forest,
