Page:Panama-past-present-Bishop.djvu/26

6 the Revolution, and are still on the Isthmus to-day. Though most of the smaller streams are little more than creeks, they produce a great volume of water-power which may some day be utilized.

There are no lakes of any size, but there are several lagoons or natural harbors, almost completely landlocked. Chiriqui Lagoon, on the Atlantic near the Costa Rica line, has long been used as a coaling station by the United States Navy. The deep Gulf of Panama, on the Pacific, bends the greater part of the Isthmus into a semicircle.

Instead of running north and south, as you would naturally suppose, the Isthmus runs almost due east and west. That is because South America lies much farther to the east than most of us realize; so much so, that if an airship were to fly far enough in a bee line from New York to the south, it would find itself over the Pacific, off the coast of Peru. At Panama, the Pacific, instead of being west of the Atlantic, is southeast of it. That is why the Spaniards, coming overland to this new ocean from the one they had left on the north, called it the "South Sea." A glance at the map on page 4 will make this plain. It sorely puzzles the visitor to the Isthmus to find the points of the compass apparently so badly twisted, particularly when he sees the sun rise out of the Pacific and set in the Atlantic.

Though the two oceans are so near together at this point, there is a great difference in the rise and fall of their tides. The harbor of the city of Panama, on the Pacific side, where there is twenty feet of water at high tide, is nothing but a mud-flat at low tide, and the