Quite recently Dr. W. Heyd has announced through the Berlin Geographical Society the discovery of two commercial routes from India to the West not hitherto described. Trebizond (on the Black Sea) and Tana (at the mouth of the Don) were the chief distributing points. Through Tana passed westward the pepper and ginger and nutmeg and cloves; and the price of spices is said to have doubled in Italy, when the Italians were for a time shut out of Tana in 1343. The chief overland route from India to Tana ran through Cabul to Khiva by the Oxus, and then by land through Astrakhan. The other route to Trebizond passed through Persia, and came out by Tabriz to the Black Sea. It may perhaps be pardoned, if a far homelier, more modern, and even local, illustration be given of the present point, that trade makes roads. The western wall of Williamstown is the mountain range of the Taconics, whose general height is about 2000 feet above tide water at Albany. Within the limits of this town are four natural depressions or passes over this range, which is also the watershed between the Hoosac River on the east and the Little Hoosac on the west. About the beginning of this century, the population was quite sparse in both these valleys, while the impulse to travel and traffic over the barrier was sufficient to build (wholly at local expense) wagon roads over each of the four passes, one of which soon after became a turnpike between Northampton and Albany; and another was built mainly to accommodate the medical practice on the west side of the mountain of Dr. Samuel Porter--a Williamstown surgeon of local eminence. So soon as railroads were constructed to run down these parallel valleys (railroads themselves are perhaps the best illustration of the point in hand), the mountain roads were relatively deserted, and only two of them are now open to transient travel.[2]