While 100 pounds of ocean water contains 31⁄2 pounds of salt, 100 pounds of water from the Great Salt Lake of Utah contains 22 pounds of salt. This lake is seventy miles long, thirty miles broad, with an average depth of eight feet. Its surface is 4,200 feet above the level of the sea. No living creatures are found in this water. There is no outlet to the Great Salt Lake but two fresh water rivers empty into it.

THE SUEZ CANAL.

Opened in 1869. First cost sixty million dollars. This canal is eighty-five miles long. Connects Mediterranean Sea with the Red sea. Shortens the route between Europe and India. Without this canal vessels would have to go around the Cape of Good Hope to get to India. From London, England, to Bombay, India, by the old route, the distance is 11,220 miles and through the canal the distance is 6,330 miles-shortening the distance nearly 5,000 miles. Port Said is at the Mediterranean entrance and Suez is at the Red Sea entrance. The level of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean is exactly the same but at the Red sea end there is a tide of 6 feet while at the Port Said end the tide rises just 12 feet.

WHERE ARE THE GREAT CANALS?

Suez the Largest and Oldest, Languedoc the Longest, and the

Soo the Busiest of Artificial Waterways.

When Tyre and Sidon, the greatest maritime cities of classic times, were hardly more than settlements, and a thousand years before the reputed fall of Troy, tradition has it that by 2,000 B. C. the ancient Egyptians had dug a navigable ditch from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea.

Thus, in all probability the Suez Canal-which holds, and will hold until the completion of the great cut through the American isthmus, the palm as the greatest interoceanic waterway-is historically the grandfather of them all.

As it stands today, with its 85 miles of length, it is not quite sixty years old, having been begun in 1859, by the Frenchman de Lesseps, who finished the work in ten years. Its cost, in its present form, was slightly in excess of one hundred million dollars; the gross tonnage carried through in a year is in the neighborhood of fifteen million tons.

The French seem to have been always foremost in realizing the value of canals, for they were the first modern people to undertake on a large scale a system of artificial waterways, though most that they made had no deep-sea connections. Under Louis XIV, however, in 1681, the famous Languedoc cut was completed. This connects the Bay of Biscay with the Mediterranean, and though it has the rather remarkable length of one hundred and sixty-eight miles, it is not a shipcanal, being too shallow to float anything larger than hundred-ton barges.

Of modern channels connecting bodies of salt water, that between the Gulf of Cornith and the Gulf of Aegina is invaluable to the cities of southern Europe. By its four miles of cut, largely through picturesquely bleak walls of granite, it reduces the distance from Adriatic ports to the Black Sea about one hundred and seventy-five miles, and from Mediterranean ports, about one hundred miles. Like the Suez Canal, it is without locks, being on the sea-level, with a depth of twenty-six feet. It was completed in 1893, at a cost of about five million dollars. According to tradition, the plans for this canal go back to Alexander the Great, who first conceived the idea. Julius Caesar projected the cut, and Nero actually began it, but soon lost interest.

Two waterways have been constructed from the north to the Baltic Sea, the Elbe and Trave Canal and the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal, the last