350 PROCEEDINGS OP TIIE VICTORIA INSTITUTE. 
you have the central districts of Trinidad in miniature. The 
rains have re-produced on the road in six months what the 
rains have produced on the district at large during geological 
periods of hundreds of thousands of years. 
Gentlemen, I would ask you from this little illustration to 
try and picture to yourselves the appearance of the central dis- 
trict of Trinidad if the forests were removed and you were to 
look down upon it from a balloon. It would look exactly like 
that natural soil road after six months rain : keeping now this 
appearance strictly in view, it must be evident to you that if 
a road or railway is laid out, generally speaking, in the direction 
of the ridges or intervening valleys, it may be kept at any 
eas y gradient — but if forced contrary to nature, the road is 
tossed up and down ten times in a mile, ten bridges are wanted 
every mile, and the road when made, can never become a cart 
road, still less a carriage road or a bicycle track. True enough, 
you may ease the gradients by winding down to the valleys and 
up on to the ridges — but you double the length of the road in 
this way, you spend a great deal of money in side cuttings, and 
the road even then can never be so level as when run along 
the ridges, and leaving out the question of macadam ; the mere 
formation and bridge building mounts up to <£2,000 a mile 
instead of £200. Now, here I approach a question which I 
think may evoke considerable difference of opinion — I hold 
strongly to the idea that roads as a rule, should converge on a 
light railway as far as possible at right angles, and that there 
is no pressing necessity to put a road immediately alongside of 
a railway. \ ou cannot have a first-class road brought to every 
man’s door, but you accommodate a much larger number of 
planters by letting the main roads separate from the railway 
over as large an area as possible, and letting the railway itself 
supp 1 )' the place of a main central road. The idea in the minds 
of those people who in 1887 initiated the present railway exten- 
sion was thus : To have a light railway run through the 
country chiefly to carry road metal to make roads ; they even 
proposed, where possible, to let the railway run on the existing 
roads and work the railway as a tram line. Surveys of the 
Main Eastern Road, the Caparo Road, and the St. Helena Road 
were made m 1888 with this intention. There was to be no 
money spent for years on railway stations. Huts were to be 
built on the side of the line, wherever the line met a road or 
where the line passed through a large estate. These huts were 
to accommodate the planters’ produce, exactly the same system, 
in fact, as is adopted on the. sea coast of the Island with regard 
to the coast steamer. It was taken for granted that at first 
the passenger traffic would be small, and the system of working 
