Geographically, Panama is the connecting link between South and Central America. This book originally published under the title "Panama: past and present"; tells the history of Panama and its development. "A hundred thousand years ago, when the Gulf of Mexico extended up the Mississippi Valley to the mouth of the Ohio, and the ice-sheet covered New York, there was no need of digging a Panama Canal, for there was no Isthmus of Panama. Instead, a broad strait separated South and Central America, and connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. This was the strait that the early European navigators were to hunt for in vain, for long before their time it had been filled up, mainly by the lava and ashes poured into it by the volcanoes on its banks...."