230 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



one could seriously entertain such an absurdity as intentional 

 "porosity "in a "solid" road of broken stone, would have 

 been incredible to him. His gamrs f me n, women and 

 children, — whole families sometimes, — wrought by the 

 side of the way, lifting two or three yards of the old road 

 out of the mud at a time, breaking stone at ten pence per 

 ton by measurement, and immediately replacing them hand- 

 somely on the highway. The shining contrast between the 

 old and new work was a powerful argument in its favor, and 

 the welcome idea spread like wildfire. 



He reduced the expenses of the road-trusts he consoli- 

 dated ; but, as his figures showed three-fourths hand-labor, 

 instead of three-fourths team-work, as formerly, we can see 

 how the old road barnacles must have hated him for teach- 

 ing the people. 



The most of M' Adam's sayings we see quoted now-a-days 

 are used in such a way as to make nonsense of them. His 

 injunction not to break stone on the road referred to his 

 wholesale treatment of rough road-work, which could not 

 be done in the muck of old road-beds, without soiling the 

 fresh fractures of his new-made material. But there are 

 very many times when the hammering of cruel projections 

 from the surface of our stone-roads would relieve men and 

 animals from torment at a very cheap rate, — if M'Adam 

 had not forbidden it. Considerable roughness is required 

 in our practice to overcome the dread of " resurfacing," and 

 make the people cry out for another coat of rough stone, as 

 well as to assist in producing what is called a "bond" for 

 it. 



M'Adam despised any form of dirt among his metals : — 



"Nothing is to be laid on the clean stone under the pretence 

 of binding" 



With his boulders broken fine enough to fill their own 

 interstices, there was no need of that "pretence." 



He did direct that broken stone, when applied to a road, 

 must be carefully " scattered over the surface, one shovelful 

 following another, and spreading over a considerable space." 

 This was very sensible in M' Adam's roadside practice, 

 where he was liable to find all sorts of stones — some softer 

 than others — gathered from the land and dumped into the 



