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108 after they left it, but even so, the health of the force was remarkably good, for men toiling in a tropical swamp at a time when no doctor knew how to fight malaria and yellow fever. There was besides no cold storage to preserve the food, almost every mouthful of which had to be brought two thousand miles from New York.

A bridge of massive timbers was thrown across the

Chagres at Barbacoas, and the road pushed on to the crest of the divide, at Culebra. In the meanwhile, men and materials had been shipped round the Horn, and eleven miles of track were laid from Panama to Culebra. Here, "on the twenty-seventh day of January, 1855, at midnight, in darkness and rain, the last rail was laid, and on the following day a locomotive passed from ocean to ocean."