Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/93

Rh of the adjoining buildings. People with strong nerves, and accustomed to this rattle from early youth, may to some extent become hardened, but they will never get to be insensible to it; any indisposition is aggravated by the nuisance, and for recovery they hurry to the country. People with weak nerves, especially delicately-organized women, suffer great and permanent injury to the health. Nothing but the constant torment has partially dulled us to this evil. If cities had never been afflicted with this noise, and if, in a competition with other more suitable materials, stone pavements were adopted, a storm of opposition would soon sweep them out of existence again. Some of these difficulties have been obviated by using smaller and harder stones; but the objection to the improved Belgian pavement in general use, on account of the germs of disease stored in the wide joints and under the blocks, still remains.

To do away with the objection to stone pavements, efforts were made to introduce into cities the macadamized roads, which had proved eminently successful as country roads; these efforts have proved signal failures, though, when properly made, and in thoroughly good order, macadamized roads approach perhaps more nearly the desiderata than most others that have been tested, and are among the pleasantest and safest roadways in ordinary use. But the constant outlay for repairs, the difficulty of traction over them when recently laid, and considerations of hygiene and comfort, are such serious objections that they are gradually being displaced by other kinds of pavement. Whoever is doomed to live on a macadamized street needs no description of its horrors. These streets have justly been nicknamed crushing-mills for granite. Six hundred and fifty thousand tons of granite are annually pulverized on the streets of London, of which but one-sixth is due to the wear of paving-stones, the rest is attributable to the macadamized roads. This dust has to be scrubbed, washed, and brushed ever so often from clothes, furniture, stairs, and floors, before it is finally removed through silt-basins and carts, or sewers and river.

A little rain transforms these streets into broad slush-beds from which every thing within reach is bespattered by the hurrying wheels of vehicles. Ladies with modern garments cannot cross them, and whoever visits along such streets must leave a certain quantity of dirt on floors and carpets. But mud is not the worst affliction, for this mash, consisting of stone-dust, sand, and horse-dung, is transformed into dust by dry and hot weather, is whirled up by the rolling wheels, or, still worse, is drifted by wind, rendering the air unfit for respiration, penetrating into the tender, sensitive cavities of the lungs, settling on skin, hair, and clothes; suffocating the flowers and green leaves of plants along parked streets; forbidding the opening of windows, fouling the glass, and driving through the joints of the sash; lodging in curtains and blinds, spoiling the costly products of industry and