C. F. Bertoncini, formerly an employee of the French Company, was put in charge of engineering records and drafting. E. C. Tobey, already named as Treasurer of the Zone, became the head of the department of accounting and of materials and supplies. Charles J. Strom, a mechanical engineer, was charged with the task of examining and rehabilitating the machinery and supplies left by the French. M. O. Johnson became supervising architect. Carleton E. Davis was chosen to direct the work of providing the cities with water and sewers. All told, there were about 1,000 men at work under the Commission in various capacities, on July 1, 1904.

Mr. Wallace was at the very outset, however, confronted with a difficulty, or with a dilemma, which proved serious and embarrassing. The first necessities of the situation were to ascertain the best way of doing the work and to make the Zone fit for men to live in while doing the work-in brief, surveys and sanitation. But the Government and people of the United States were in a hurry to "see the dirt fly" in the construction of the canal itself. It was evident that if work was begun on the canal on a great scale at once, before proper preparations were made, disaster would result. Yet, if at least a great showing of work were not made, there would be discontent and grumblings at the slowness of the Commission and its Chief Engineer. Confronted with this dilemma, Mr. Wallace did what seemed to him the best. He set a host of men at work at the Culebra cut, and ordered a number of huge steam shovels, so as to be able to report much actual excavation, and at the same time he essayed the work of sanitation.

Colonel Gorgas went to Panama with Mr. Wallace, and assumed charge as chief sanitary officer, with headquarters in the fine hospital built by the French at Ancon, just out of Panama, and began, against some local prejudice and opposition, and with a melancholy meagreness and slowness of support from the Commission, the tremendous task of extirpating yellow fever and at least of keeping malaria in

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check. The construction of water supply and sewer systems for Panama and Colon was also begun, but the work was much delayed. Water was to be provided for Panama by damming the Rio Grande to form a reservoir, 235 feet above sea level. Thence a sixteen-inch iron conduit was to convey the water to a high-level distributing reservoir at Ancon, from which, at an elevation of 200 feet, giving ample pressure, mains would conduct it to all parts of the city. The system was designed to give a supply of 2,000,000 gallons a day, or more than 66 gallons per capita of the population. The plans for this indispensable and most urgent work were submitted by Mr. Wallace to the Commission on August 9, 1904, and were in due time approved. Much energy was displayed in building the dam across the Rio Grande, and in preparing the route of the conduit and in building the reservoir at Ancon. But there was painful and apparently inexcusable delay in shipping the iron pipes from the United States. The last lot of them was not sent until May, 1905, eight months after they had been asked for! Despite this delay, however, water was turned into the mains and was drawn from some hydrants in the city of Panama on July 4, 1905. Work on the sewers was begun in the fall of 1904, and the system was nearly completed in a year. The repaving of the streets could not, of course, be begun until the water mains and sewers were laid, and so had to be postponed until late in 1905, when it was pushed with much energy, the streets in the heart of the city being paved with vitrified brick, and those in the outskirts with stone macadam. In February, 1905, authority was granted to Mr. Wallace for the construction of eight new hotels, and by June 1, two of them, at Culebra and at Corozal, were finished and occupied, though the supervising architect, M. O. Johnson, died of yellow fever in April of that year. By July 1, 1905, Mr. Wallace had increased the working force tenfold, to a total of 10,000 men. In a subsequent chapter we shall see what a penalty was paid for the delay in sanitation, and how much better it would have been had the demand to

"make the dirt fly" been held in abeyance until the Isthmus had been redeemed from pestilence.

For the present, let us turn back to the engineering and surveying work which Mr. Wallace so elaborately organised. The investigations at Gatun showed conclusively that a dam there would be extremely difficult if not impossible to construct. For a dam of such dimensions, a foundation of bed rock was regarded as necessary, and that was not to be found nearer the surface than two hundred feet below sea level. It was thereupon assumed by the engineers that a dam at that point was outside the limits of practical consideration. At Bohio another gigantic dam had been proposed, such as would need a bed-rock foundation. But that was nowhere found in that region at a less depth than 167 feet below the sea, which was also regarded by many engineers as too deep. At Gamboa, on the other hand, undoubted bed rock was found at about sea level, and therefore, in Mr. Wallace's opinion, that was decidedly the best point for a dam. The Gamboa dam would not be needed if the highest level plan, 90 feet, were adopted, but it would form an essential feature of any lower level, or of the sea-level plan. If the last named were adopted, the Gamboa dam would shut the waters of the Chagres from the canal altogether, and would divert them, through a tunnel and the San Juan River, to the Pacific Ocean, or, perhaps preferably, through an open cutting to the Caribbean.

Work in the great Culebra cut was, as I have said, necessary no matter what plan of canal was adopted. Mr. Wallace conducted it largely, however, in experimental fashion, and for the sake of determining the best method of doing it and the lowest cost at which it could be done. He began with the old-fashioned machinery left by the French, but in November, 1904, began the use of enormous steam shovels of American design and make, of which he secured and introduced more than a dozen. Each of these machines, manned-with its appurtenant trains of cars for carting away the dirt-by fifty men, did the work of 500 men under