No. 4.J COUNTRY ROADS. 227 



ducing either durable or smooth roads of broken stone. It 

 puts a weakness in theory just where the carelessness of 

 workmen is most liable to be fatal to the integrity of the road. 



Quoting or condensing from Penfold, a contemporary of 

 M'Adam, Gillespie well describes the behavior of broken 

 stone in "even sizes," with open joints, as we have been 

 laying them for years in sight of everybody : — 



"If a thick coat be laid on at once, there is a very great 

 destruction of the material before it becomes consolidated, 

 if it ever does so. The stones will not allow one another to 

 be quiet, but are continually elbowing each other and driv- 

 ing their neighbors to the right and to the left. This con- 

 stant motion rapidly wears oil* the angular points and 

 reduces the stone to a spherical shape, which, in conjunction 

 with the amount of mud and powder produced, destroys the 

 possibility of any iirin aggregation, and the road never 

 attains its proper condition of hardness." 



The above scrap was published in London in lS'oo, but it 

 will pass for recent American road history, and can be read 

 in the unsound structure of our broken-stone roads almost 

 anywhere. 



European malpractices, discovered at home, are played 

 on American cities and villages. It is not the road-mender 

 alone who needs to be taught, but our whole people. The 

 road-mender has grand chances to learn from his own and 

 his fellow's blunders ; but who is teaching our people ? 

 Boards of education have robbed us of the picture in the 

 spelling-book showing the superior " virtue in stones," but 

 boards of health ought to save us from street-tilth leaching 

 through " porous" roads into our cellars. 



Stone road work that is "porous," while at the same 

 time "unyielding" and "solid," seems to have been first 

 advocated in the vicinity of Boston, on whose dry bottoms 

 fabrics of that peculiar description may have the air and 

 water arrangements crushed and ground out of them in time 

 by dint of heavy travel ; and this without other loss than 

 by bruising the heels of taxpayers over rough surfaces, and 

 costs for maintenance. 



Many other cities — used to cubic yards of ventilated 

 stone — admit the honeycomb impeachment. They tried the 



