224 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



hated were levelled so that not one stone remained upon 

 another. Gardening and farming tribes in the earliest ages 

 must have seen that scattering stones would sink in the soil 

 by their own weight, and prehistoric log-rollers — the first 

 broad cart wheels — were doubtless used by the ancients to 

 settle the pebbles rooted up by the plough. 



This leads us to the idea that dislocated stones, wandering 

 from the road-bed, are so much lost to the body and cohe- 

 rence of the fabric ; and that any intrusion of earth or 

 clay in the substance of a stone-road is a divisor, an enter- 

 ing wedge of decayed material, mud-mortar, scamped mason- 

 work, an element of disintegration, and one of the earliest 

 symptoms of the total destruction of a highway. 



Our roads are wretched, and, while road literature is of the 

 same muddy structure and texture, our endeavors to amend 

 practice must be largely experimental, and, till we get our 

 beads clear, should be entered upon with extreme caution. 

 It will be far cheaper to study the blunders already before us 

 than to make a new spread of our own in search of expe- 

 rience. 



In union there is strength. This should be the stone- 

 road maker's motto and law. He must see to this in 

 preparing a place for his road materials. Let it be a drained 

 concave bed in the earth he has to make a road over. 

 AY here the bottom is more loamy than sand or gravel, there 

 may be occasion for artificial drainage. 



The road principles hinted at in the accompanying engrav- 

 ing are too various to be conveyed on paper. The art of 

 road making, like the working of metals, comes only by 

 thought, practice, experience and labor. Grass, earths, 

 sand, gravels and rocks are all manageable by methods in 

 strict accord with their great variety of natures. Skill 

 results from the personal handling of road materials. The 

 children of a generation that has built fifteen hundred 

 thousand miles of iron and steel roads on wooden foundations, 

 should enter the field of common road making modestly and 

 with caution. The writer has no local road advice to offer 

 to places and persons he has not seen and examined. His 

 words are to be applied at the reader's risks and charges. 

 The turf-gutters in the picture will shed water from road 



