Roads and Higlnoays : their History, ^c. 383 
tUscoverecl in a state of preservation sixteen centuries after their 
lormation. Their construction consisted of a pitching of large 
stones evenly placed and bedded together, covered with concrete, 
and coated with a layer of broken stones and gravel. The plan 
pursued by those ingenious and common-sense people, in all 
their large engineering works, of employing their soldiers, and 
under them their captives and convicts, enabled them to carry 
out schemes of road-making, embanking, and water-supply, 
in a manner which is still the wonder and envy of modern 
nations. 
The highly civilised state to which the aboriginal inhabitants 
of Central America attained led them to the construction of 
good and permanent roads. Cortes and Pizarro found on their 
arrival in ^lexico and Peru a complete system of highways. The 
Peruvians, more especially, had developed their system, by con- 
necting their principal towns with substantial roads. One of 
these, which passed over the mountain-chain of the Andes, was 
nearly 2000 miles in length, and is described by Prescott as being 
conducted over pathless sierras covered with snow, galleries 
being cut for leagues through rocks ; rivers crossed by means 
of bridges that swing suspended in the air ; ravines of hideous 
depth filled up with solid masonry ; in short, all the difficulties 
which beset a wild and mountainous region, and which might 
appal the most courageous engineer of modern times, were en- 
countered and successfully overcome. The road was built of 
heavy flags of freestone, and covered, in parts at least, with 
a bituminous cement, which time has made much harder than 
the stone itself. In some places, where the ravines had been 
filled up with masonry, the mountain-torrents, wearing on it for 
ages, have gradually eaten a way through its base, and left the 
superincumbent mass (such is the cohesion of materials) still 
spanning the valley like an arch. 
The barbarous tribes who completed the destruction of the 
Roman Empire, and drove that people from all their conquests, 
were ill-suited and less inclined to foster or preserve the works 
of art with which the Romans had stamped their presence in 
all those lands where their victorious army had led them. War, 
plunder, and rapine, constant quarrels leading to the burning of 
villages, the cutting of embankments, and ruinous destruction of 
! all works, was the occupation of our Saxon and Danish prede- 
cessors ; and the blow thus given to the march of civilisation was 
many years before it was overcome. 
I As the country became more settled after the Norman Con- 
quest, towns acquired charters, and with them power and inde- 
pendence. Commerce began to flourish ; a settled population 
