46 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. . 



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 

 ])ounds. 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 

 horizontal plane it is decidedly crooked. And after all, the dif- 

 ference in length of a straight and slightly curved or windi^ig 

 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 " the longest way round the shortest 

 way home." We see, therefore, that straightness, though very 

 desirable when it can be had, is by no means the highest char- 

 acteristic 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 addition to the friction to bo overcome. To draw a 

 load up an incline, the resistaiice 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, I wish to call your attention to a few of the more 



