To return to the Roman Roads. Although inferior to the Britons of the nineteenth century in the art of spending money, if judged by the present state of science, the Roman road-makers could not be despicable engineers: their levels were chosen on different principles, but their lines of roads passed through the same counties, and generally in the same direction as our railways. A diagram in the _Quarterly Review_, exhibiting a general view of the direction of the principal Roman roads in England, shows that, on comparing one or two of our principal lines, we shall find, that the Great Western supplies the place, with a little deviation near Reading, of the Roman _iter_ from London to Bath and Bristol; the Liverpool and Manchester, and on to Leeds and York, replaces the northern Watling-street; the Great Eastern follows a Roman way, and so of the rest.[8] Professor Phillips has thus strikingly illustrated this comparison to be made in the North of England. "As now two railways, so a little earlier two mail-roads, and far earlier two British tracks, conducted the traveller from South Britain through the sterner country of the North. This is the inevitable result of the great anticlinal ridge of stratified rocks--our Pennine Alps--thrown up from Derbyshire to the Scottish Border. This is the 'heaven water' boundary of the river drainages: on the west of it ran the line of road northward from Mancunium; on the east of it the line from Eburacum; the former nearly in the course of the North-eastern, the latter not lately deviating from the North-eastern rail. Along these routes Agricola divided his troops: these were the routes followed alike by the Pict and Scot, Plantagenet and Tudor, Cavalier and Roundhead. Wade lay on the east of these mountains, while the Stuart overran their western slopes: and Rupert swept up the western tract to surprise the besiegers of York."[9] On the whole it appears that the lines of the earlier British roads were indicated by the great features of nature; and that, for the most part, the Roman ways followed and straightened the old tracks.