Land travel continued both difficult and costly in all the colonies throughout the whole of the earlier industrial period, and roads were so poor, even a century after New England was settled, that not until 1722 was a team driven for the first time from Connecticut to Rhode Island. To emphasize the effect of rivers, we may note that in New York, where the Hudson was the highway, the average cost of carrying a bushel of wheat one hundred miles was but two pence, compared with a shilling in Pennsylvania, where forty wagons, one hundred and sixty horses, and eighty men were required to transport the same amount of freight handled by two or three men on a scow in New York. This high cost of land carriage, which, added to the ocean freights, had the effect of fostering home manufactures as against importations from England, also restricted the areas of distribution, and tended to localize industry.[5] Footnote 5: V. S. Clark, _History of Manufactures in the U. S., 1607-1860_ (Carnegie Institution, Washington, 1916), pp. 88 _ff._ It was not, however, merely the lack of an adequate system of river transport that served to stimulate manufacturing in New England in competition with the mother-country. The character of such rivers as she possessed peculiarly adapted them for the purpose of supplying power, for not only are falls and rapids numerous in all of them, but the “fall-line” in New England is nearer tidewater than it is anywhere else along the coast. In addition, the regularity of the rainfall, and the great number of lakes, which form natural reservoirs, cause the flow of the rivers to be more constant than in other parts of the country. From all these causes, the little Merrimac, for example, which is otherwise insignificant as an American river, is the most noted water-power stream in the world.[6] Footnote 6: _Report on the Water-Power of the U. S_.; Census Report, 1885. The soil of New England is of glacial origin, about three quarters of it being of boulder-clay, stubborn in character and difficult to cultivate, but of fair and lasting fertility, due to the steady decomposition of the smaller pebbles. The remainder, largely in the southeast, is sandy and of little or no use for agriculture, owing to the rapid draining away of all moisture.[7] That on the uplands is thinner and poorer than in the valleys, and the uplands predominate. Footnote 7: N. S. Shaler, _United States_, vol. 1, p. 54.