LOCOMOTION AND TRANSPORT. 



1. IN the first attempts at an interchange of the products of 

 industry, which mark the incipient commerce of a people emerging 

 from barbarism, human labour and the strength of the inferior 

 animals, applied in the most rude and direct manner to transport, 

 are all the means brought into play. The pedlar and the pack- 

 horse perform all the operations of interchange which take place 

 in an infant society. Pathways are formed over the natural 

 surface of the ground, in a course more or less direct, between 

 village and village. The beds of streams following, by the laws 

 of physics, the lowest levels, serve as the first indication to the 

 traveller how to avoid steep acclivities, and, by deviating from the 

 most direct and shortest course, to obtain his object with a 

 diminished amount of labour. 



As industry is stimulated and becomes more productive, inven- 

 tion is brought more largely into play, and these rude expedients 

 are improved. "Wheel carriages are invented, but the earliest 

 theatre of their operations is the immediate surface of the soil 

 from which the products of agriculture are raised. They are used 

 to gather and transport these to a place where they may be 

 sheltered and secured. 



But to enable wheel carriages to serve as the means of transport 

 between places more or less distant, the former horse-paths are 

 insufficient. A more uniform and level surface, and a harder 

 substratum, become indispensable. In a word, a ROAD, constructed 

 with more or less perfection, is necessary. 



These roads, at first extremely rude and inartificial, and rendered 

 barely smooth and hard enough for the little commerce of an infant 

 people, are gradually improved. The carriages, also, which serve 

 as the means of transport undergo like improvement, until, after 

 a series of ages, that astonishing instrument of commerce, the 

 modern road, results, which is carried on an artificial causeway, 

 and reduced, at an enormous expense, to a nearly level surface by 

 means of vast excavations, extensive embankments, bridges, 

 viaducts, tunnels, and other expedients supplied by the skill and 

 ingenuity of the engineer. 



Between the pack-horse, used in the first stages of growing 

 commerce, and such a road with its artificial carriages, there is a 

 prodigious distance. The first step, from the pack-horse to the 

 common two-wheel cart, was, in itself, a great advance. 



It is calculated that a horse of average force, working for eight 

 or ten hours a day, cannot transport on his back more than two 

 hundredweight, and that he can carry this at the rate of only 

 twenty-five miles a day over an average level country. The 

 same horse, working in a two-wheel cart, will carry through the 

 same distance per day twenty hundredweight, exclusive of the 

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