legislature, Edgeworth observes, has limited, in several instances, the height of hedges to five feet; but this limitation is neglected or evaded. Even were it strictly adhered to, it would not be sufficient for narrow roads; the hedges would be still too high, for it is the sweeping power of the wind which carries off dust in dry weather, and which takes up moisture in wet. In fact, roads become dry by evaporation; and, when they are exposed to the sun and wind, the effect of heat and ventilation are more powerful than any surface drainage that could be accomplished. Walker observes that the advantage of having the hedge next the road consists in its greater safety to the traveller, particularly if a ditch of any considerable depth is necessary, and in the hedge being supported in its growth from the ground under the road, without drawing upon the farmer's side of the ditch. The fences, Telford observes, form a very material and important subject, with regard to the perfection of roads; they should in no instance be more than five feet in height above the centre of the road, and all trees which stand within twenty yards from the centre of it ought to be removed. I am sure that twenty per cent. of the expense of improving and repairing roads is incurred by the improper state of the fences and trees along the sides of it, on the sunny side more particularly; this must be evident to any person who will notice the state of a road which is much shaded by high fences and trees, compared to the other parts of the road which are exposed to the sun and air. My observations, with regard to fences and trees, apply when the road is on the same level as the adjacent fields; but in many cases, on the most frequented roads of England, more stuff has been removed from time to time than was put on; the surface of the road is consequently sunk into a trough or channel from three to six feet below the surface of the fields on each side; here all attempts at drainage, or even common repairs, seem to be quite out of the question; and by far the most judicious and economical mode will be to remove the whole road into the field which is on the sunny side of it.-Examination before the House of Commons, &c.

3. Of the foundation of roads.-Edgeworth, Marshall, and all the practical engineers before Mr. M'Adam differ with him as to the base of roads. The author of Landed Property in England would prepare the ground by striking off the protuberances, and filling up the hollow parts: the footpath and the higher side of the soft road being raised with the earth which is required to be taken off the bed of the hard road; whose base or foundation ought to be formed with peculiar care. Every part is required, as he says, to be firm and sound: dry earth, or hard materials, being rammed into every hollow and yielding part. In a dry situation, as across a gravelly or stony height, little more, he says, is required than to remove the surface mould, and lay bare the rock, or bed of gravel beneath it: and, then, to give the indurate base a round or a shelving form, as the lying of the ground may require. In this way, a travelable road may be made, and kept up, at one-tenth of the expense incurred by the ordinary practice in this case;

which is to gather up the surface-soil into a ridge, and, on this soft spongy bed, to lay, coat after coat, some hard materials,-fetched perhaps from a distance. But M'Adam contends that a stratum of hard materials covering a morass will last longer than a similar stratum laid on rock; indeed, according to this able engineer, it may be questioned whether a properly made road on a bog, which yields by its elasticity, will not last longer than one on a firm surface. In Ireland this is said to be found actually the case: For the same cause,' as Fry observes, 'that a stone placed upon a wool-pack would bear a greater pressure before it would be broken, than it would if placed on an anvil.'-Essay on Wheel Carriages, &c. Edgeworth and many others have recommended covering the base of an unsound road with faggots, branches, furze, or heath. Flat stones, he adds, if they can be had, should then be laid over the faggots, and upon them stones of six or seven pounds' weight, and, lastly, a coat of eight or ten inches of pounded stone. If the practicability of consolidating a mass of stones of six or eight ounces weight and under each, so as to act as one plate or flooring, be admitted, then the faggots and flat stones must at least be useless, and the stones of six or seven pounds' weight injurious; because, whenever the upper stratum has worn down a few inches, some of these stones, and eventually the greater number will be worked up to the surface, and the road destroyed or put in a state to require lifting, breaking, and relaying. A basement of trees, bavins, or bushes, was made use of by Walker when the ground was soft. They carry off the water previous to the materials of the road being so consolidated as to form a solid body, and to be impervious to water. Bushes are, however, not advisable to be used, unless they are so low as always to be completely moist. When they are dry and excluded from the air they decay in a few years, and produce a sinking in the road; a thickness of chalk is useful for the same purpose in cases where bushes are improper: the chalk mixing with the gravel or stones becomes concreted, and presents a larger surface to the pressure.

Mr. M'Adam would lay his 'metals' at once on the earth, provided it were even a bog, ‘if a man could walk over it.' In his examination before the house of commons he says, 'the Somersetshire morass is so extremely soft that when you ride in a carriage along the road you see the water tremble in the ditches on each side; and the vibration so great that it will break you in.' Yet here he would use no large foundation stones, nor faggots, nor any material larger than will weigh six ounces. If a road be made smooth and solid, it will be one mass, and the effect of the substrata, whether clay or sand, can never be felt in effect by carriages going over the road; because a road well made unites itself in a body like a piece of timber or a board.' And we may now introduce

4. Mr. M'Adam's system.―This able and ingenious engineer agrees with many of his predecessors that a good road may be considered as an artificial flooring, forming a strong, solid, smooth-surfaced stratum, sufficiently flat to

admit of carriages standing upright on any part of it, capable of carrying a great weight, and presenting no impediment to the animals or machines which pass along it. In forming this flooring, he has, however, gone one material step beyond his predecessors in breaking the stone to a smaller size, and in forming the entire stratum of this small-sized stone. It is in this point, of making use of one small size of stones throughout the stratum, that the originality of Mr. M'Adam's plan consists. It is doubted by some whether this would be durable in the northern districts at the breaking up of frosts, and especially in the case of roads not much in use, or consisting of a stratum less consolidated, and more penetrable by water. The durability of roads,' he says, 'will of course depend on the strength of the materials of which they may be composed, but they will all be good while they last, and the only question that can arise respecting the kind of materials is one of duration and expense, but never of the immediate condition of the roads.'-Remarks on Roads, &c. p. 11. Roads can never be rendered perfectly secure, according to this gentleman (see his report to the board of agriculture), until the following principles be fully understood, admitted, and acted upon namely, that it is the native soil which really supports the weight of traffic; that while it is preserved in a dry state it will carry any weight without sinking; and that it does, in fact, carry the road and the carriages also; that this native soil must previously be made quite dry, and a covering impenetrable to rain must then be placed over it to preserve it in that dry state; that the thickness of a road should only be regulated by the quantity of materials necessary to form such impervious covering, and never by any reference to its own power of carrying weight. The erroneous opinion, so long acted upon, that by placing a large quantity of stone under the roads, a remedy will be found for the sinking into wet clay, or other soft soils; or, in other words, that a road may be made sufficiently strong, artificially, to carry heavy carriages, though the sub-soil be in a wet state, and by such means to avert the inconveniences of the natural soil receiving water from rain, or other causes, seems to have produced most of the defects of the roads of Great Britain. At one time Mr. M'Adam had formed the opinion that this practice was only a useless expense; but experience has convinced him that it is likewise positively injurious.

In confirmation of this, if strata of stone of various sizes be placed as a road, it is well known to every observant road-maker that the largest stones will constantly work up by the shaking and pressure of the traffic; and that the only mode of keeping the stones of a road from motion is to use materials of a uniform size from the bottom. In roads made upon large stones, as a foundation, the perpetual motion, or change of the position of the materials, keeps open many apertures, through which the water passes. It has also been found that roads placed upon a hard bottom wear away more quickly than those which are placed upon a soft soil. This has been apparent upon roads where motives of eco

nomy, or other causes, have prevented the road being lifted to the bottom at once; the wear has always been found to diminish, as soon as it was possible to remove the hard foundation. As to the fact, already adverted to, that a road lasts much longer over a morass than when made over rock, the evidence produced before the committee of the house of commons showed the comparison, on the road between Bristol and Bridgewater, to be as five to seven in favor of the wearing on the morass, where the road is laid on the naked surface of the soil, against a part of the same road made over rocky ground.

Water, with alternate frost and thaw, are the great evils to be guarded against in the base of a road consequently nothing can be more erroneous than providing a reservoir for water under the road, and giving facility to the water to pass through the road into this trench, where it is acted upon by frost to the destruction of the road. As no artificial road can ever be made so good and so useful as the natural soil in a dry state, it is only necessary to procure and preserve, according to M'Adam, this dry state of so much ground as is intended to be occupied by a road. The first operation is to be the reverse of digging a trench. The road should not be sunk below, but rather raised above the ordinary level of the adjacent ground; care should at any rate be taken that there be a sufficient fall to take off the water, so that it should always be some inches below the level of the ground upon. which the road is intended to be placed: this must be done, either by making drains to lower ground, or if that be not practicable, from the nature of the country, then the soil upon which the road is proposed to be laid must be raised by addition, so as to be some inches above the level of the water.

Having secured his soil from under-water, the road-maker is next to secure it from rain by a solid road made of clean dry stone or flint, so selected, prepared, and laid, as to be perfectly impervious to water; and this cannot be effected unless the greatest care be taken that no earth, clay, chalk, or other matter, that will hold or conduct water, be mixed with the broken stone; which must be so prepared and laid as to unite with its own angles into a firm, compact, impenetrable body. The thickness of this body is immaterial, as to its strength for carrying weight; this object is already obtained by providing a dry surface, over which the road is to be placed as a covering or roof, to preserve it in that state: experience having shown that if water passes through a road, and fill the native soil, the road, whatever may be its thickness, loses its support, and goes to pieces. In consequence of an alteration in the line of the turnpike-road, near Rownham-ferry, in the parish of Ashton, near Bristol, it was necessary to remove the old road. This road was lifted, and re-laid very skilfully in 1806; since which time it has been in contemplation to change the line, and consequently it has been suffered to wear very thin. At present it is not above three inches thick in most places, and in none more than four yet, on removing the road, it was found that no water had penetrated, nor had the frost affected it during

the winter preceding, and the natural earth beneath the road was found perfectly dry. Various new roads have been constructed on this principle within the last few years; the great north road from London, by Hoddesdon, in Hertfordshire; two pieces of road on Durdham Down, and at Rownham-ferry, near Bristol; with several private roads in the eastern parts of Sussex, are amongst the best specimens. None of these roads exceed six inches in thickness; and, although that on the great north road is subjected to a heavy traffic, it has not given way, nor was it affected by the severe winters it has experienced, and when other roads between that and London became impassable, by breaking up to the bottom, and the mail and other coaches were obliged to reach London by other routes. Improvement of roads, says M'A. (in 1824), upon the principle I have endeavoured to explain, has been rapidly extended during the last four years. It has been carried into effect on various roads, and with every variety of material, in seventeen different counties. These roads being so constructed as to exclude water, consequently none of them broke up during the late severe winter (1819-20); there was no interruption to travelling, nor any additional expense by the postoffice in conveying the mails over them, to the extent of upwards of 1000 miles of road.'

We may add that several large streets and thoroughfares of the metropolis have been unpaved, and laid down again on the principles of Mr. M'Adam. The result has not been uniformly successful; but in the cases where the paving system has been renewed, we believe the base has been M'Adamised, and so a substantial improvement has, on the whole, been obtained. ROAM, v. n. & v. a. Ital. romigare; Goth. ROAM'ER, n. s. ruma. See Rooм. To wander without any certain purpose; to ramble; rove; to play the vagrant. Imagined to come from the pretences of vagrants, who said they were going to Rome.'

ROANNE, a considerable trading town of France, on the left bank of the Loire, where that river is only forty miles north-west of Lyons. In the beginning of the last century it was a mere village; and it owes its increase to its having become an entrepot for goods sent from the east and south-east of France, to Orleans, Nantes, Paris, &c. It has now 7000 inhabitants. The streets stretch out in various directions into the country, and the most remote parts of them are intermixed with trees. In the interior, however,

it has tolerably straight streets, and good houses; and manufactures of linen, cotton, small iron wares, &c.

ROANOKE, a river of North Carolina, formed by the union of the Staunton and the Dan, the former of which rises in Virginia, and the latter in North Carolina, and flows into Albemarle Sound, long. 76° 56′ W., lat. 35° 58′ N. It is navigable for vessels of considerable burden thirty or forty miles, .and for boats of thirty or forty tons to the falls, seventy miles; and for boats of five tons for the distance of 200 miles above the falls. The country watered by this river is extremely fertile. Below the falls vast quantities of Indian corn are raised; and the planters are among the wealthiest in the state. Exertions are making to improve the navigation of this river by constructing canals around the falls: opening a water communication between Norfolk, Valentia, and the interior of North Carolina, and the southern part of Virginia.

ROAR, v. n. & n. s. Į Saxon ɲaɲan; Goth. ROAR'ER, n. s. runtir. To cry as a lion or wild beast; bellow; cry in distress; make a loud noise: the cry or noise made: a roarer is a noisy man.

The young lions roared upon him, and yelled. Jeremiah ii. 15.

Roaring bulls he would make him to tame.

from her head, and an ear was torn by pulling off an ear-ring; each of these cases was determined to be a robbery. The hundred in which a robbery is committed is liable to pay the damage when it is committed between the rising and setting of the sun, on any day except Sunday, in case the robbers are not taken in forty days; hue and cry being made after the robber. The property taken must be of some value. Therefore, in a case where the prisoner had obtained a note of hand from a gentleman, by threatening with a knife, held to his throat, to take away his life, and it appeared that she had furnished the paper and ink with which it was written, and that the paper was never out of her possession, this was holden not to be a robbery; the judges being of opinion that the note was of no value to the prosecutor, and not within the proviso of statute 2 Geo. II. c. 5. sect. 3: making the stealing a chose in action felony.

ROBE, n. s. & v. a. Fr. robbe; Ital. robba; low Lat. rauba; Span. ropa, quod à Gr. pwnos, i. e. mercy.-Minsheu. A gown of state; a

dress to invest with robes. Through tatter'd cloaths small vices do appear; Robes and furred gowns hide all. Shakspeare. What Christian soldier will not be touched with a religious emulation, to see an order of Jews do such service for enlarging the christian borders; and an order of St. George only to robe and feast, and perform rites and observances ?

Bacon.

The last good king, whom willing Rome obey'd Was the poor offspring of a captive maid; Yet he those robes of empire justly wore, Which Romulus, our sacred founder, wore. Dryden. There in long robes the royal magi stand; The sage Chaldæans rob'd in white appeared, And Brachmans.

Thomson:

Pope's Temple of Fame. Robed in loose array she came to bathe. ROBERT I. or ROBERT BRUCE. See BRUCE and SCOTLAND.

ROBERT OF GLOUCESTER, the oldest of the English poets. He flourished in the reign of Henry II. Camden quotes many of his old English rhymes, and speaks highly in his praise. He died in the beginning of king John's reign, at an advanced age.

ROBERTS (Rev. Peter), M. A., a Welsh divine, and writer on British history, was a native of North Wales, and received his education at Trinity College, Dublin. Having taken orders, he obtained the living of Halkin, in the county of Flint. He published, Letters to M. Volney, in answer to his book on the Revolution of Empires, 8vo.; A Harmony of the Epistles, 4to.; A Sketch of the Early History of the Ancient Britons, 8vo.; and A Review of the Policy and Peculiar Doctrines of the Modern Church of Rome, 1809, 8vo. But his best work is The Chronicle of the Kings of Britain, 1810, 4to, a translation from the ancient Welsh Chronicles, with copious notes and illustrations. His death took place in 1819.

ROBERTS' ISLANDS, two large islands of the Pacific, discovered by Henguist, in 1792. The largest has no convenient landing place, and seems only to be inhabited by tropical oceanic birds. The north-west side of the island has a more favorable aspect; and, although its shores are rocky, a number of trees are produced.

There are also some coves and bays, which afford good anchorage and shelter. Long. 219° 47 E., lat. 7° 5' S.

ROBERTELLS (Francis), a learned Italian, of the sixteenth century, who was successively professor of philosophy and rhetoric at Lucca, Pisa, Bologna, and Padua. He wrote commentaries on several of the Greek and Latin poets, and several other works. He died in 1567.

ROBERTSON (William), D. D., a learned divine, born in Dublin, in 1705. He took the degree of M. A. at Glasgow, whence he returned to Ireland, and, entering into orders, obtained several considerable livings. All these, however, he resigned in 1764; and, in 1766, published his apology, with reasons for what he had done. He presented a copy of his work to the University of Glasgow, upon which the professors gave him the degree of D. D. The company of merchant tailors, patrons of the grammar-school of Wolverhampton, presented him with the mastership of it, in which office he died in 1783.

ROBERTSON (William), D. D. and F. R. S., of Edinburgh, a late celebrated historian and clergyman of the church of Scotland, born in Edinburgh in 1721. He was educated at the school of Dalkeith, and afterwards at the University of Edinburgh. In 1743 he was appointed minister of Gladsmuir. On the death of his parents he took his sisters and a younger brother, afterwards a respectable jeweller in Edinburgh, under his care, though his living did not then exceed £100 a-year, and maintained them till they were all settled in the world. In 1751 he married the daughter of the Rev. Mr. Nisbet, one of the ministers of Edinburgh. About this period he began to attain eminence as an orator, and not long after became a leading member in the General Assembly. In 1755 he preached a ser mon before the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge, on the state of the world previous to the appearance of Christ, the only one he ever published, and which was much admired. In February, 1759, he published his celebrated History of Scotland, in 4to., which was received with unbounded applause. While this work was in the press, he was translated from Gladsmuir to Edinburgh. In 1759 he was appointed chaplain of Stirling Castle; in 1761 one of his majesty's chaplains; and in 1762 principal of the University of Edinburgh. In 1764 the office of king's historiographer for Scotland was revived in his favor, with a salary of £200 a-year. About 1761 he began, and in 1769 published his celebrated History of Charles V. in 4to. In 1775 the Dr. published his History of America, for which excellent work he received £4500. In 1780, after having for nearly thirty years acted the most conspicuous part in the supreme ecclesiastical court, he retired from the General Assembly. In 1790 he published his Historical Disquisition concerning ancient India. He died at Edinburgh, June 11th, 1793. As an author, his style has been universally admired; as a minister of the gospel, he was a faithful pastor, and justly merited the esteem and veneration of his flock. His conversation was cheerful, entertaining, and instructive; his manners affable, pleasing, and endearing.