400 
Roads and Highways : their History, 
The experiments for obtaining the traction were made with 
one of Howard's dynamometers attached to a waggon with three- 
inch wheels, loaded with stone, the total weight being 2 tons. 
The weight given is the number of lbs. required to move this 
load. 
These three roads form the entrance into a provincial town 
of 20,000 inhabitants, surrounded by a large and very productive 
agricultural district, with a navigable river, and a railway 
having communication with all the large centres of industry. 
The first two examples may be regarded as town roads, but the 
third is a fair sample of a highway leading to a market town, 
the expense of material being very heavy, the granite costing 
about 12s. a ton at the railway station, and having to be carted 
from 2 to 3 miles. 
As a further illustration of the economy of using good ma- 
terials, it may be stated that on a turnpike-road in Lincolnshire, 
26 miles in length, the saving effected by the use of granite, 
instead of gravel, and by proper management, was on an average 
276^. a year, or about 10/. per mile, and the road became so 
much improved that one horse could more easily draw a cart 
with a load of 1^ ton than it could before with three-quarters 
of a ton. This fact was confirmed by the men engaged in cart- 
ing coals from a railway station to a large village, who assured 
me that their horses were less distressed on the improved road 
with the larger load than they were with the smaller one on the 
bad road. 
In one district in Leicestershire the cost of manual labour 
by the introduction of granite and better management sunk 
from 1400/. to 600/. a year, or from 13/. per mile where no 
granite was used, to 6/. lOs. per mile after its introduction. 
The material should be applied in the following manner : — 
In the summer months it should be led, and deposited along 
the road in heaps of 1 J ton at regular intervals. As soon as the 
wet weather in autumn commences, the wheel-tracks and hollow 
spaces caused by the treading of the horses' feet should be filled 
in with a shovel from the wheelbarrow, and, as fresh tracks are 
made, fresh material should be put on, and this be continued up 
to the end of December or middle of January, practice showing 
that all fresh material put on after that time works loose in sum- 
mer-time. A bad gravel road may thus be converted in about 
three years at a comparatively small expense into a hard, firm 
road, the quantity of granite averaging for an ordinary highway 
for the first two or three years about 50 tons per mile, and after- 
wards about 30 tons a year. A turnpike-road through an 
ordinary agricultural district will require about 50 tons of 
granite per mile. By this plan it has been found in practice 
