Many of our roads were originally laid out without any attention to general topography, and in most cases followed the settler's path from cabin to cabin, the pig trail, or ran along the boundary lines of the farms regardless of grades or direction. Most of them remain today where they were located years ago, and where untold labor, expense, and energy have been wasted in trying to haul over them and in endeavors to improve their deplorable condition. The great error is made of continuing to follow these primitive paths with our public highways. The right course is to call in an engineer and throw the road around the end or along the side of steep hills instead of continuing to go over them, or to pull the road up on dry solid ground instead of splashing through the mud and water of the creek or swamp. Far more time and money have been wasted in trying to keep up a single mile of one of these "pig-track" surveys than it would take to build and keep in repair two miles of good road. Another and perhaps greater error is made by some persons in the West who continue to lay out their roads on "section lines." These sections are all square, with sides running north, south, east, and west. A person wishing to cross the country in any other than these directions must necessarily do so in rectangular zigzags. It also necessitates very often the crossing and recrossing of hills and valleys, which might be avoided if the roads had been constructed on scientific principles. [Illustration: A STUDY IN GRADING [_The old road had a grade of eight per cent; by the improved route the grade is four per cent_]] In the prairie state of Iowa, for example, where roads are no worse than in many other states, there is a greater number of roads having much steeper grades than are found in the mountainous republic of Switzerland. In Maryland the old stagecoach road or turnpike running from Washington to Baltimore makes almost a "bee line," regardless of hills or valleys, and the grades at places are as steep as ten or twelve per cent, where by making little detours the road might have been made perfectly level, or by running it up the hills less abruptly the grade might have been reduced to three or four per cent, as is done in the hilly regions of many parts of this and other countries. Straight roads are the proper kind to have, but in hilly countries their straightness should always be sacrificed to obtain a level surface so as to better accommodate the people who use them.