heir perfume, and
refreshing him by their shade, so grateful under the burning sky of
the tropics. In the midst of sandy wastes, which occasionally
intervened, where the light and volatile soil was incapable of
sustaining a road, huge piles were driven into the ground to indicate
the route of the traveller."

Mr. Prescott might have added, that these magnificent works were
constructed by a people ignorant of the use of iron, and unsupplied with
wheel-carriages. The only beast of burden was the llama; and the long
files of these patient and docile animals, winding along the broad
causeways of the Andes recalled to the invaders the long strings of mules
stepping in single file along the rocky paths cut out from the sides of
the Iberian sierras. Iron and fire-arms alone were wanting to the
Peruvians to enable them to rival the most potent of the European
kingdoms both in the arts and arms which maintain empires.

Of New Roads we shall speak very briefly, and rather of their effects
than of their history. It would indeed be idle, in a rapid sketch like
the present, to be diffuse upon a subject which those who travel may
study with their own eyes, and those who stay at home may learn from many
excellent recent books. {104}

The defiance of natural obstacles, the massive piles of masonry, the
filling up of valleys, the perforated hill, the arch bestriding the river
or the morass, the attraction of towns towards the line of transit, the
creation of new markets, the connection of inland cities with the coast,
the interweaving of populations hitherto isolated from one another, the
increase of land-carriage, the running to and fro of thousands whose
fathers were born and died in the same town or the same district,--all
these are features in common with the Flaminian and AEmilian ways, and
with the roads laid down by the genius and enterprise of Stephenson. The
old and the new roads, both in their resemblance and in their difference,
suggest and express many of the organic distinctions and affinities of
the old and the new phases of civilization.

For, apart from a feature of distinction already noticed, that in the
ancient world all or nearly all public works were executed by and for the
State, we may here remark that in England especially, where
centralization is feeble, and local or personal interests are strong, the
construction and conduct--the _curatio_, as the Romans phrased it--of
great roads a