Page:Aspects of nature in different lands and different climates; with scientific elucidations (IA b29329668 0002).pdf/328

 *[Footnote: attention once again to the circumstance that the shortest way to the shores of the Pacific, which was shown by the natives to Alonso Martin de Don Benito, is in the eastern part of the Isthmus, and led to the Golfo de San Miguel. We know that Columbus (Vida del Almirante por Don Fernando Colon, cap. 90) sought for an "estrecho de Tierra firmë"; and in the official documents which we possess of the years 1505 and 1507, and especially 1514, mention is made of the desired "opening" (abertura), and of the pass (passo), which should lead directly to the "Indian Land of Spices." Having for more than forty years been occupied with the subject of the means of communication between the two seas, I have constantly, both in my printed works and in the different memoirs which with honourable confidence the Free States of Spanish America have requested me to furnish, urged that the Isthmus should be examined hypsometrically throughout its entire length, and more especially where, in Darien and the inhospitable former Provincia de Biruquete, it joins the continent of South America; and where, between the Atrato and the Bay of Cupica (on the shore of the Pacific), the mountain chain of the Isthmus almost entirely disappears. (See in my Atlas géographique et physique de la Nouvelle Espagne, Pl. iv.; in the Atlas de la Relation historique, Pl. xxii. and xxiii.; Voyage aux Régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, T. iii. p. 117-154; and Essai politique sur le Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne, T. i. 2de édit. 1825, p. 202-248.)

General Bolivar at my request caused an exact levelling of the Isthmus between Panama and the mouth of the Rio]*