Hon. George Alvin Loud, Congressman from the tenth district of Michigan, delivered an illustrated lecture on "The Panama Canal" in Emerson J. yesterday afternoon.

Few people realize the tremendous importance of the Panama Canal and the magnitude of the task undertaken by the United States in building it. The distance by water from New York to San Francisco is 13,000 miles, but when the canal is finished it will be but 5,000 miles, and whereas the battleship Oregon in the Spanish war made the trip from the Pacific to the Atlantic in 66 days, after the canal is completed but 15 days will be required for a similar trip.

The difficulties that the United States faced when it took up the problem of building the canal were many and great. The French had made a failure of the undertaking, and De Lesseps, the French engineer who so successfully superintended the building of the Suez Canal, had been obliged to give up in despair. The location of the canal once decided upon, engineers were a long time determining the kind of a canal to be built. The lock type was finally adopted for many reasons, one of the most important of which was the presence of the Charges river, which with its frequent floods made a sea-level canal out of the question. The greatest problem of all to be solved was that of sanitation, the problem that the French never solved. Through the wonderful work accomplished by Colonel Goethals, the death-rate, which in 1906 was 41 per thousand laborers, was reduced in 1908 to 13 per thousand. Yellow fever and small-pox, which had previously carried off thousands of men, were completed wiped out. The money expended in bringing about this reform will be $20,000,000 before the canal is finished, but it is estimated that already over 15,000 lives have been saved because of improved sanitary conditions.

At the present rate of construction it is hoped that the canal will be completed by November, 1912, and the total cost will be in the neighborhood of $375,000,000.