This man was the inventor of bridges--his family repudiated him,
and he came to a bad end. From this to cutting down the pine and
bringing it from some distance is an easy step. To avoid detail, let us
come to the old Roman horse-road over the Alps. The time between the
shepherd's path and the Roman road is probably short in comparison with
that between the mere chamois track and the first thing that can be
called a path of men. From the Roman we go on to the mediaeval road with
more frequent stone bridges, and from the mediaeval to the Napoleonic
carriage-road.
The close of the last century and the first quarter of this present one
was the great era for the making of carriage-roads. Fifty years have
hardly passed, and here we are already in the age of tunnelling and
railroads. The first period, from the chamois track to the foot road,
was one of millions of years; the second, from the first foot road to the
Roman military way, was one of many thousands; the third, from the Roman
to the mediaeval, was perhaps a thousand; from the mediaeval to the
Napoleonic, five hundred; from the Napoleonic to the railroad, fifty.
What will come next we know not, but it should come within twenty years,
and will probably have something to do with electricity.
It follows by an easy process of reasoning that after another couple of
hundred years or so, great sweeping changes should be made several times
in an hour, or indeed in a second, or fraction of a second, till they
pass unnoticed as the revolutions we undergo in the embryonic stages, or
are felt simply as vibrations.
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