ram ramens. ilannosn.•

ACCOP.DING to-Mr. Robert. T-otnes, the shares of the Pananneliail- way, even when the road was about to open in. January l80, did. not receive so much attention from capitalists as, the.merita, of the undertaking deserved. The. Directors accordingly resolved: to make a little stir by a publio excursion along the whole line from Aspinwall on. the Atlantic seaboard to Panama on the Pa,.

eific, the party being conveyed. to Aspinwall from New York in a. steamer. 'Various oratorical celebrities from Congress, the pulpit,.

and the bar, were invited to the treat.; but they. could. not come.. The Directors were therefore reduced, to wad out into the streeta. for brietless barristers,. newspaper reporters, and_ a few share- holders A proposal being.made- to 3E: Tomes to join the party, he accepted the offer of .a trip to the Pacific and nothing:to pay. Although Mr. Tomes is jocular on.speeelifying- and. newspaper- reporting, we opine that. he is or has been a repel:ter himself; at least- he has the characteristics of the class. He never throwa away the chance of making a " sketch," or a " sun pia- tura," no matter how slight the subject or how small its rely., tion to the matter in hand. The feelings on departure—the oat, ing, drinking, sleeping,. and °mates on the voyage—what is ta be seen at Aspinwall. and Panama, with, sundry entertainments and excursions. enjoyed there—are all thrown. off in the way of " aur own oorrespondmt " 1ie1y. and, telling; but very superficial,. aomewhat forced' in the stnonft or livelyparts,.and.with the uneom-. fortable doubt continually intruding; how much of' this: in really true? Mr. Tomes, however, is smart sad clever, with aome,. knowledge of the wOrld,, a coamopolitantoleration,, a.goed. deal. oL ,jocose pleasantry,, said when, he has &subject which possesses at. once matter. and.uoveltY, he well presents it to tire mind. The de.- scription of the railway trip is interesting from.the greabeessof the feat, and. striking front the scenery through. which it passes. Thia, is-an impressive bit at starting.

"For seven miles the road_passewthroughndeep marsh, in which.the en- gineers, during the original, surrey,, struggled breast-high, day after day,, and yet.in spite of such toilsome and perilous labour, fixed their steady eyes straight forward, went. on step by step, and accomplished their- purpose. These seven mileeare frem now as a stone pavement. Piles upon piles have, been driven deep down into the spongy soil, and the foundation covered thick with a persistent earth, brought from Monkey Hill, which overhang& the railroad track two miles from Aspinwall. "On we go, dry-shod, over the marsh, through the forest, which shuts out with its great walls of verdure on either side the hot sun, and darkens the road with a perpetual shade. The luxuriance of the vegetation is beyond' the powers of description. Now wspese impenetrable thickets of mangroves, rising out of deep marshes, and sending from each branch down into the earth, atulfrom each root into the air, offehoota which gather together into a matted growth, where the observer seeks in vain to unravel the mysterious involution of trunk,'-root, branch, and foliage. Now we come upon gigantic .saves and ooratoa, with girths olthirty feet, and statureaof a hundred and thirty feet-; out of *single trunk of which, without a plank or aseam the- natives build great vessels of, twelve tons burden. These giants of the forest seem, like the U,b tam; offspring.of heaven and earth, for they embrace with their. mighty arms the one,, and.efing deep down into the bosom of the other • and. the great twining phuita which, rising from their roots, coil about their, tr6ks,. bind themselves in Awiaterlfibre abaut their branches, and joining these great trees inseparably together, fasten them to the ground, remind us of the prisonment which. the titaneof old suffered from the cruelty of their father Ccelus."

The moat solid and important information relates to the railway itself, and the Atlantic terminus.of Aspinwall, named after one of the projectors of the company.- The city in its grandeur exists only on Bristol hoard; the actual houses being chiefly of wood; and not exceeding a hundred : its -site, is a small coral island named: Manzanilla, lying close te.the shore. From the nature of the:cli- mate, Aspinwall is not likely ever to become more than a depat for goods and a mere pleoe intransitu for passengers. Accord- ing to our author, it must be one cif the.niost unhealthy spots upon

ear"Thhe island of Manzanilla is but a few inches above the level of the Atlantio at high-tide; and being as porous as a sponge, from the nature of the soil— composed of the detritus of vegetable growth—is, consequently, with the ex- ception of a marrow rim of coral shore, an oozy marsh. With such a soil, and a perpetual summer, the temperature of which rises to 840 and never descends below 72', with incessant rain six months of the year, and frequent showers during the so-called dry seamm—from December to June—the island is, of course, unhealthy. The alternate action of sun and rain upon the rank vegetable growth, saturated with moisture and seething in a constant sum- mer-heat, necessarily keeps up a perpetual process of rotting fermentation, which engenders intermittent, bilious, congestive, and yellow fevers, and the other malignant results of impure mianu

nae exhalation. • «

"I had no reason to go into the hospitals—which I did, and saw some miserable specimens of suffering humanity—to, find out the state of health in Aspinwall. A walk in the streets was painfully convincing of the feet that I was among the sick and the dying. The features a every man, woman, or child, European, African, Asiatic, or American, I met, had the ghastly look of those who suffer from the malignant effects oh:nisei/mac poison. I do not believe there le a wholesome person in all Aspinwall; at any rate, every single individual leaked confessed to having suffered from the disease of the climate. The littleNegroJazasica children Invariably answered my question as to how they liked the country, with the plaintive words, Me no like die country, berm bad country ; we hab de feber ebry oder day.' A physician employed by the Railroad Company, who has been two yearace the Isthmus,. told me plainly- that no one who resided over two months in Aspinwall escaped fever; that the first attack was generally, a severe bilious remittent, which not seldom resulted in death, aud was always followed by habitual fever and ague. Such, he assured me, was the intense maliguity of the mis mimetic poison, that perfect recovery from the disease of the climate, or any • Panama in 1855: an Account of the Panarna,Bailroad, of the Cities of ?snares- and Aspinwall, with Sketches of Life and Character on the lellanee. 117: RORK-. TOMS. Published by Harper lirotheuare. w York; Low, London.

acclimation, unless a perpetual fever and ague may be so termed, was im- possible. The beasts even do not escape."

The execution of the railway does infinite credit to American enterprise, science, energy, and determination. Tropical marshes

and Tropical forests, interposed engineering difficulties of an un-

exampled kind. The climate struck down the Chinese, the Coolies of India, the Irish, and injuriously affected even the Negroes from Jamaica. Undeterred by pestilence and death, the Company ga- thered together native labourers of all races, and were thus enabled to continue their works. The country yielded nothing either for materials or food ; for the difficulties of getting at and transporting the timber through the Tropical forest and swamp rendered it cheaper to import it. "Not only were the rails to a considerable extent laid on American pine, but the bridges, and the houses and workshops of the various settlements, were of the same wood, all fashioned in Maine and Georgia. The metal-work, the rails, the locomotives, and the tools, were brought either from England or the United States. The daily food of the labourer even came from a New York market." Now that success has attended the specu- lation, the traveller is conveyed across the Isthmus from the Atlantic to the Pacific in four hours and a half, in comfort ; whereas formerly it took nearly a week of hardship, privation, and

exposure in a boat, with a fatiguing land journey. The Panama railway does not yet monopolize all the traffic. The Nicaragua route saves a little time ; gold is still sent on mule-back, the charge being less than by rail ; for heavy goods our author thinks the navigation by Cape Horn will still have the preference.

This favourable picture of American enterprise has its reverse, in which the national vices come out as strikingly as the virtues.

The disposition to clutch at present profits without regard to

future stability, with the evil qualities which attend upon the worship of "the almighty dollar," are visible. The undertaking was essentially a mercantile speculation, in which a profit on the

capital advanced was the end of the project. With this legitimate end were combined other objects, which, as they could not be avowed, of necessity involved concealment, and its usual conco- mitant fraud. The fair cost of the railway would have been much greater than the concocters of the scheme conceived would go down with the public. "Accordingly," says Mr. Tomes, "engineer after engineer was dismissed, until one was found whose arithme- tic accorded with the close calculations of avaricious trade." The

result has been, a road imperfectly executed as regards design,—

the too little incline, for example, involving frequent slips in that rainy country ; and badly made as regards materials ; the roadway passing over soft ground; the line being carried over wooden posts instead of along viaducts; buildings, bridges, and so forth, being constructed of wood instead of stone or iron. This false economy, adopted to induce the public to purchase shares, is more injurious in the Isthmus of Panama than in a temperate climate, because the moisture and heat act rapidly and- deleteriously upon wood,— as we suspect they will in a lesser degree upon iron and stone without constant attention and expense. The consequence is, that a large portion of the line wants almost reconstructing already.

"Many miles of it are yet supported upon trestle-work—wooden props— which often lift the trains scores of feet in the air ; whence the traveller, clutching fast to his seat, looks down upon deep gorges of rough precipitous

rock and angry swollen streams' with an alarm which is only relieved by his passage to the solid security of terra firma. There are also portions of the road where the train seems to feel its way with unusual caution, and. jolts

along with an irregularity of movement which is sure to excite the curiosity of the inquisitive if not the fears of the anxious traveller. The knowing ones, if they are communicative and have no fear of Wall Street, will tell you that these are the soft parts of the road. And if you push your in- quiries you will learn that this softness is in consequence of the yielding soil, which has no more tenacity than soft-soap, or the result of the decay of

the sleepers, or cross-ties of native wood, which are crumbling into dust from the ceaseless borings of that busy little insect the coruihen, or rotting away

in the quick decay of the hot moist climate. The traveller, as he looks upon the pine buildings of the stations and the wooden water-tanks, is surprised at the black ataine of decay, the marks of ruin, and the rank growth which cover them, and hardly believes he is upon a new road just opened to travel, until he discovers that days quicken life and hasten death in that region of rapid change with greater speed than years in his own land of slow develop.

meat. meat. • The deficiencies of the road are being promptly met by the inexhaust- ible energies of the chief engineer, and thousands of labourers are busy bal-

lasting and filling in the trestle-work. Great piles of lignum vitro or guaia- cum ties, brought from the forests of Carthagena, are heaped up by the road- side at Aspinwall, and will be substituted for the decayed ones of native wood. It is, however, believed, that even the toughness of the lignum vitm

will soon yield to the rapid decomposition of the climate of the Isthmus. In fact, there are some which have been tried not many months, which, accord- ing to one of the employes of the road, already show signs of decay. Stone masonry will be found necessary to give the road the permanency of a last- ing institution. Iron bridges, which the chief engineer authoritatively states have been already 'adopted,' will be substituted for all the wooden structures. Adopted' —the word Colonel Totten ingeniously, if not inge- nuously, usee—refers, however, it is supposed, to the operations at the Rail- way-o ce in Broadway ; for that gentleman pointed out an iron bridge of some half-dozen feet in length as the only one 'adopted' on the route, on

the 2d March 1855, out of some 130 to be necessarily adopted' in the future. The bridges vary from six feet to six hundred, and cross two large rivers, the Chagres and Gatun, and endless streams and gullies.

"It will also be necessary to build the stations and tanks of brick, stone, iron, or of some more enduring material than wood, as they are rapidly fall- ing into ruin, and look more like the antiquated remnants of the past than the fresh structures of the enterprise of today."

It would be a curious thing if this railroad, remarkable as it undoubtedly is, should be finally abandoned ; a result which is not unlikely, if a direct communication by rail, across the prairies to California, should be established and a ship canal made through the Isthmus. The want of a port at either end is a great drawback to the Panama Railroad.