A pontist, then, must try to see clearly, under a form of visual conception, what part his subject played in the earliest war of organic life, when natural bridges aided the first animals not only to hunt over great territories, but to migrate from their first homes into lands very far away. In the second chapter we shall try to feel the inspiring pressure of events which must have acted during the descent of man on a brain remarkable for its imitative faculties. Perhaps we can get into imaginative touch with our earliest ancestors; perhaps we can find in ourselves a vestige of their aboriginal nature; and then we shall know, by a sympathy which we shall not question, how each natural bridge helped them in their wanderings, and became a model to be copied, and adapted, and improved. Such is the beginning of our enviable studies, but their end is never reached. Not even the long days and years of Hilpa and Shalum, in Addison, where antediluvian seconds endure about as long as our trivial minutes, would be enough for a complete study of bridges and roads, viewed as inestimable servants to the commonweal of mankind. A complete study would follow their evolution through eight world-wide subjects: architecture, civil engineering, antiquarian research, the development of trade and commerce from primitive barter, social wayfaring, war and its red tragedies, the longevity of barbaric customs, usages, traditions, and the ups and downs of fortune in the slow fever called progress, whose clinical thermometer has been tribal and national enterprise, and whose gradual effects on the temperature of bodies civil have produced many withering crises fatal to civilizations. These eight subjects are vastly intricate as well as world-wide. In scope they are infinite, if we compare their magnitude with the brief seasons of our perishable days. Let us then ask ourselves a question: How much may we expect to learn about bridges and roads, the distributive agents of all human aims and ambitions? Suppose we live to be threescore years and ten, and suppose we work gladly for eight hours a day from the age of fifteen to that of seventy; encouraged by perfect health, and so delighted with our work that we rescue Sunday from a sabbatarian inertia, and lose no time at all by being drudges to the holiday mania. For a pontist never need be idle; not only has he a thousand problems to reconsider, but in all his walks and rides he is a wayfarer with his hobby. When he feels cocksure he can visit a detestable railway bridge and drink the wormwood of pessimism; and when for a whole week he has tried in vain to follow a devious fact through all its golf-ball antics from bunker to bunker, let him go to a classic bridge such as the Puente Trajan over the Tagus at Alcántara; or let him be as a delighted pupil to Turner’s Walton Bridges or to Brangwyn’s magnificent vision of the Pont St. Bénezét at Avignon.