Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1892 edition. Excerpt: ...to hunt up a snake for dinner. Upon an island near his cave he was wont to find a toothsome variety of serpent; but on this occasion a flood had swelled the river and swept away his stepping stones. The poor fellow was in a bad plight, and while he was rummaging about for consolation in the pathetic winds he discovered that the storm had uprooted an enormous pine tree and hurled it across the torrent. Using this for a footpath, our friend, to use an Irishism, passed over upon dry ground. Such was the inception of the historic bridge. There can be no doubt that the first means used by primitive man to cross rivers and streams were stepping stones, fallen trees or beams of timber. When the stream was too wide for one plank to reach across it the stepping stones would be used for piers and several beams thrown over them, thus making a continuous bridge. Little progress in the art of bridge building was made in the dreary millenniums between the rude barbarian and the cultured Egyptian, Grecian and Roman. Owing to the savage spirit of perpetual warfare, in earliest times a bridge would have been as much an invitation to an invader as it is now to commercial greatness. Alexander's pontoon bridge over the Ganges, those of Darius over the Bosphorus and the Danube; that of C;esar over the Rhine, of Xerxes across the Hellespont, and Trajan's great structure in Dacia, all meant slaughter and spoliation. History ascribes to the beautiful and romantic queen, Semiramis, the credit of building the first important and useful bridge, when, seeking to make Babylon the peer of Nineveh, she threw her famous structure across the Euphrates in 783 B.c. This bridge had a wooden superstructure and was 500 furlongs in length. It had stone piers, which were built...