Vol. IX. will take up the historic waterways which most influenced westward conquest and immigration; the famed Cumberland Road, or Old National Road, "which more than any other material structure in the land served to harmonize and strengthen, if not to save, the Union," will be the subject of the tenth monograph. Two volumes will be given to the study of the pioneer roads of America, and two to the consideration of the history of the great American canals.
The history of America in the later part of the pioneer period, between 1810 and 1840, centers about the roads and canals which were to that day what our trunk railway lines are to us today. The "life of the road" was the life of the nation, and a study of the traffic on those first highways of land and water, and of the customs and experiences of the early travelers over them brings back with freshening interest the story of our own "Middle Age." Horace Bushnell well said: "If you wish to know whether society is stagnant, learning scholastic, religion a dead formality, you may learn something by going
