THE EVOLUTION OF THE STREET—I. 
By CHARLES MULFORD ROBINSON 
T here are conventional texts for articles 
on many municipal subjects. If you are 
writing the story of the growth of Chicago, 
you begin by telling of a cow that set 
the town afire. If you are writing on 
city government, you take as your text the 
quotation from Mr. Bryce, about the “ one 
failure in American government.” If Bos¬ 
ton is your theme, you remark that the cattle 
laid out the older streets. Now, as regards 
the latter, there are suggested so many in¬ 
teresting steps of transition, from a cow-path 
to a great business highway, that in consid¬ 
ering “ the evolution of the street,” one is 
tempted to start with this example. One 
asks oneself if the Boston street be not the 
perfect text, having in its beginning a conve¬ 
nient illustration of the original germ or seed. 
But speaking literally, cows are not as a 
rule the original plotters of town streets. 
And in the broader and abstract sphere of 
theory there is something back of even a 
cow-path—a time when the cows were not 
confined to paths, and, at Ultima Thula, a 
time before cows were ! To learn, therefore, 
how streets began, we must go to the begin¬ 
ning of the race. Living first as hunters 
and then as herdsmen, men prowled the 
trackless woods, and then on broad plains 
and mountain slopes wandered unrestrained 
with their flocks and herds. You cannot go 
back of this in seeking the origin of streets. 
The modern thoroughfare, with its nar¬ 
row confines, its artificial drainage, paving 
and lighting, appears rather as an outcome 
of extended specialization — which is the 
