apparent electric shocks are explained, by assuming the crust of the earth to be opening in cracks and fissures, and that the formations are slipping, one by the other, giving such a motion to the surface, as one may experience by forcing the moistened finger over a surface of glass.

CHAPTER XVII.

COMMERCE, AND INTEROCEANIC CANALS.

R

A storm-cloud, lurid with lightning,

And a cry of lamentation,

Repeated and again repeated,

Deep and loud

As the reverberation

Of cloud answering unto cloud,

Swells and rolls away in the distance,

As if the sheeted

Lightning retreated,

Baffled and thwarted by the winds' resistance.

LONGFELLOW (Christus).

EVERTING again to the commercial interests locked up in a great portion of the island world,

and which but awaits the key of American energy and enterprise to open and develop, the reader may find the following chapter entertaining, by taking a general glance with me at some of the interests likely to affect the commerce and industries of America.

Professor Hanks says: As the domestic, and the other material interests of California, have prospered and expanded, so also has the commerce of the country grown into large proportions. With an import trade second only to that of New York, San Francisco has such virgin fields to occupy, as open not to her great eastern rival. To her the trade of

Australia and the Orient, including Eastern Siberia and the islands of the Pacific, geographically as well as commercially, belongs; time, freights, interest and insurance all being in her favor, as against every other port in the world.

Although the trade of San Francisco, which may be said to represent largely that of the State, has suffered in some of its departments, through the construction of two additional transcontinental railroads—the one to the north, and the other to the south, of the more central route-it still continues large, and has even increased in the aggregate, since the completion of these lateral lines, indicating that this trade is not likely to be seriously crippled by this or other interfering causes.

The value of the merchandise and treasure shipped from San Francisco in 1883, amounted to $105,000,000, of which $46,000,000 were consigned to foreign countries. Of these exports, $60,000,000 went by sea, and $45,000,000 by rail. The imports from foreign countries amounted, meantime, to $40,000,000; the following staples, among other leading articles, having been imported in the amounts here mentioned: Sugar, 133,914,154 pounds; rice, 58,315,750 pounds; tea, 20,960,248 pounds; and coffee, 17,444,777 pounds. The receipts of lumber at this port amounted, for the year, to 276,772,469 feet, valued at $5,000,000; receipts of Federal revenue, $12,558,305.

The innumerable plants and trees in the Pacific, whose bark, pith and fiber, now worked in a crude way among the natives, into paper, cloth and fibrous manufactures, could be built up into a large profitable trade under more civilized rule. The pulp could be pressed, dried, and shipped, say to San Fran

cisco, where a paper, rivaling the celebrated linen products of that article, manufactured in Europe, could easily be produced.

The black walnut, Spanish cedar, toa, tomano and prima vera, the rosewood, dye-woods and mahogany, growing so profusely in the island world, the satin, sandal and camphor trees, back up the assertion that immense commercial transactions with the Pacific Islands are in the near future.

The cordage interests might be developed in much the same way, by importing the many forms of the raw material, which nature produces in the Pacific Islands, and manufacturing them into the various articles required in our advanced civilization. As the reader is already familiar with many of the natural and cultivated products of the island world, a repetition here would prove uninteresting. The return trade of America with the islands is growing rapidly from year to year. Our breadstuffs, dry goods, canned goods, clothing, hardware, machinery, lumber, etc., now forming a considerable part of the shipping lists of commodities being forwarded to the Pacific Islands, are growing in quantity and value from year to year. So vast and valuable are the commercial interests of the islands of the Pacific, that estimated on the actual product of the Hawaiian group alone, and this on their exports only, and that to one port, San Francisco, that any estimate on the commercial possibilities of the future, would but excite the doubt and ridicule of the skeptical reader,

In round numbers, the export of the above islands to the port named, is say, 100,000 tons per annum. In comparison with the area of the available lands located in the Pacific, the above group would constitute

but the 760th part; or the whole, would export some 76,000,000 tons per year to San Francisco alone. To transport this tonnage, 15,200 1,000-ton steam or sailing vessels would be required, making five round trips per year. Assuming that San Francisco is but a distributing point, and that, too, by rail, it would require 13,800 freight trains, carrying net 300 tons per train, or 690 trains per day, or a train would have to leave our city about every two minutes, day and night. Allowing that the trains would require twenty days to make the round trip, the above number, 13,800, would be required.

If we take but twenty per cent. of the above, we would yet have a practical trade so vast that a city of a million or more inhabitants would naturally be required to take care of it.

Assuming again that the value of the exports of San Francisco to the Hawaiian group would compare as favorably with all other portions of the island world of the Pacific, the value would be something like $2,432,000,000 per annum, over three times the value of the annual exports of the United States.

PANAMA CANAL.

The proposition to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans by means of a canal, the work on which is now under, it is to be hoped, successful progress at Panama, will add greatly to the world's interest in the Pacific Islands. Of the many projects to connect the two oceans, if we add Captain Ead's ship railway, and similar schemes, the canal at Panama is about the fifty-fourth. The subjoined memorandum statement of the three most prominent undertakings, and for