Why, then, should men be so assiduous in deceiving themselves, just for the pleasure of forming systems, and leading astray persons of weak and ignorant minds? What good can possibly arise from inducing a number of people—who must inevitably be soon undeceived—to believe that all rivers and all mountains are in a direction from east to west, or from west to east; that all mountains are covered with oyster-shells—which is most certainly false—that anchors have been found on the summit of the mountains of Switzerland; that these mountains have been formed by the currents of the ocean; and that limestone is composed entirely of seashells? What! shall we, at the present day, treat philosophy as the ancients formerly treated history?
To return to streams and rivers. The most important and valuable things that can be done in relation to them is preventing their inundations, and making new rivers—that is, canals—out of those already existing, wherever the undertaking is practicable and beneficial. This is one of the most useful services that can be conferred upon a nation. The canals of Egypt were as serviceable as its pyramids were useless.
With regard to the quantity of water conveyed along the beds of rivers, and everything relating to calculation on the subject, read the article on "River," by M. d'Alembert. It is, like everything else done by him, clear, exact, and true; and written in a style adapted to the subject; he does not employ the style of Telemachus to discuss subjects of natural philosophy.
ROADS.
It was not until lately that the modern nations of Europe began to render roads practicable and convenient, and to bestow on them some beauty. To superintend and keep in order the road is one of the most important cares of both the Mogul and Chinese emperors. But these princes never attained such eminence in this department as the Romans. The Appian, the Aurelian, the Flaminian, the Æmilian, and the Trajan ways exist even at the present day. The Romans alone were capable of constructing such roads, and they alone were capable of repairing them.
Bergier, who has written an otherwise valuable book, insists much on Solomon's employing thirty thousand Jews in cutting wood on Mount Lebanon, eighty thousand in building the temple, seventy thousand on carriages, and three thousand six hundred in superintending the labors of others. We will for a moment admit it all to be true; yet still there is nothing said about his making or repairing highways.
Pliny informs us that three hundred thousand men were employed for twenty years in building one of the pyramids of Egypt; I am not disposed to doubt it; but surely three hundred thousand men might have been much better employed. Those who worked on the canals in Egypt; or on the great wall, the canals, or highways of China; or those who constructed the celebrated ways of the Roman Empire were much more usefully occupied than the three hundred thousand miserable slaves in building a pyramidal sepulchre for the corpse of a bigoted Egyptian.
We are well acquainted with the prodigious works accomplished by the Romans, their immense excavations for lakes of water, or the beds of lakes formed by nature, filled up, hills levelled, and a passage bored through a mountain by Vespasian, in the Flaminian way, for more than a thousand feet in length, the inscription on which remains at present. Pausilippo is not to be compared with it.
The foundations of the greater part of our present houses are far from being so solid as were the highways in the neighborhood of Rome; and these public ways were extended throughout the empire, although not upon the same scale of duration and solidity. To effect that would have required more men and money than could possibly have been obtained.