Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 4).djvu/181

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SPARKS AND ATKINSON
177

The Pittsburgh and Connelsville Rail Road project cannot be regarded as an entirely fruitless effort; it has, at least, produced this most valuable historical essay.

All additional information in relation to those early scenes must possess interest to every intelligent American; and we rejoice in the opportunity of placing Mr. Atkinson's valuable communication and the accompanying map before the readers of the Olden Time:


"The interest with which the routes of celebrated expeditions are regarded, and the confusion which attends them after the lapse of years, is well exemplified in the case of Hannibal, whose march toward Rome, in order to divert their army from the siege of Capua, was totally lost in the course of a few centuries. The constant blunders of Livy in copying first from one writer, and then from another who made him take a different path, justify a recent English historian who went to Italy to see the ground for himself, in saying that the Punic War was almost as hard in the writing as the fighting.