There is little in stone bridge building that the Romans did not discover. To this day their aqueducts and bridges are models of thoroughness, and apologise nobly for a civilization that rambled through wonderful achievements into a gradual suicide. While arenas for barbaric sports were being built at a great expense, and while most of the Roman roads circulated war, did many persons guess that their imperial genius in handicraft would outlive their statesmanship by hundreds of years? Who knows why Rome very often squandered her energy on the least fruitful phases of strife, neglecting those benign phases out of which intellectual vigour ought to have come, age after age, in a continuous zeal for research, and revision, and improvement? She neglected science, for instance, and her bad example was followed by the mediæval Church. Not a mind had any inkling of the fact that the brightest hopes for mankind would emerge from science, like medicinal plants from dry seeds. Innumerable millions died from ignorance because Pasteur and Lister were not evolved until the races of man were perhaps a million years old. In the creeping progress of humanity the dead have been mocked by every good discovery; there has been nothing so cruel as a healing success, for it has ever been too late by thousands of years. To visualise this truth in the strife of man is a great trial to any mind; but yet it is the one thing that a pontist cannot evade without being disloyal to his honour as a student, since he knows that strife has ruled over the tremendous drama which has had for its theatres the highways and byways, and for its actors the races of man, continuously at odds with one another. If this truth had to be deleted from the drama, then I, for one, would not be a student of roads and bridges. As well read the Greek tragedians after deleting all the passions that make for contests and crises.