550 THE AMERICAN FARMER. 



thing better. And let us not boast of our times till we have better means of communication. 

 It is a principle perfectly well established among engineers, that roads should be so sub 

 stantially constructed that the cost of maintenance shall be reduced to the minimum. The 

 fundamental principles of formation and construction should be studied and understood by 

 every road-builder, and observed in all localities, though they may not admit of so complete 

 application in a thinly-settled district as in the vicinity of a city where the travel is greater, 

 and the means of construction more abundant. 



One of these general principles is that the nearer the location of the road approximates 

 to a straight and level line, the better; but a straight line which does not at the same time 

 admit of a level profile will often lose the advantage of being the shortest distance between 

 two places. It did not occur to the projectors of our earlier roads and of our turnpikes, that 

 the handle of a pail or a kettle is no longer when it lies at rest in a horizontal position than 

 when held upright. They did not know that while a horse on a level is as strong as five men, 

 on a steep hill he is not so strong as three; for three men with a hundred pounds each will 

 ascend a hill faster than a horse with three hundred pounds. Straightness of line should 

 always -be sacrificed to obtain a level or to avoid a steep and heavy grade. 



A road curving around a hill will often be no longer than a straight one over it, for this 

 latter is called straight only because its curvature is less apparent to the eye, and compared 

 with a horizonal plane it is decidedly crooked. And after all, the difference in length of a 

 straight and slightly curved or winding road is small, for taking two places ten miles apart 

 with a road curving so that you could nowhere see more than a quarter of a mile of it at 

 once, and its length would exceed a perfectly straight road between the two places by only 

 a hundred and fifty yards. 



It has been laid down as a general rule that you may increase the length of a road to 

 avoid a hill to twenty times the height that is to be saved by such increase ; that is, to save a 

 hill a hundred feet high, it is better to go two thousand feet around it, and even then you ll 

 find &quot;the longest way round the shortest way home.&quot; &quot;We see, therefore, that Straightness, 

 though very desirable when it can be had, is by no means the highest characteristic of a good 

 road. It is far more important that it should be level, for unless we have a level surface, a 

 large part of the strength of the team must be spent in raising the load up the hill, in addi 

 tion to the friction to be overcome. To draw a load up an incline, the resistance of the force 

 of gravity is as great an addition to the whole weight of the load, as the height of the incline 

 added to its length, so that an incline of one foot in twenty requires the team to lift up by 

 main strength one-twentieth of the whole weight in addition to overcoming the friction 

 caused by the entire load. 



But leaving the location and the construction of new roads, as coming more properly 

 within the province of the professional road engineer, we call attention to a few of the more 

 striking and common mistakes in the mending and care of country roads, faults which seem 

 to arise from a want of knowledge of the first principles of road-making on the part of those 

 intrusted with the supervision of the highways. 



Form of the Eoad-Bed. Over a gravelly and hilly country, and over a flat country 

 with a stiff or clayey soil, no one would hesitate to say that the road-bed should be raised 

 above the level of the sides, and crowned sufficiently to shed the water; but the error, aston 

 ishingly prevalent, is to finish them in a convex curve forming an arc of a circle with the 

 center raised a foot, and often eighteen inches or more, and the curvature at the sides so 

 abrupt as to make it dangerous to turn out on meeting a carriage, and always giving the 

 driver a feeling of insecurity. We do not refer to the elevation above the surrounding land, 

 but simply to the shape of the road-bed, the elevation of the center above the sides, or what 

 might be called the &quot; transverse profile &quot; of the traveled part of the road itself. 



To show that this is no uncommon occurrence, we may mention that the county commis- 



