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Updated: June 2, 2025
He was making some extremely loose and inaccurate generalizations about the buildings and ruins each age had left for posterity, and Miss Grammont was countering with equally unsatisfactory qualifications. "Our age will leave the ruins of hotels," said Sir Richmond. "Railway arches and hotels." "Baths and aqueducts," Miss Grammont compared. "Rome of the Empire comes nearest to it...."
See the investment of capital in aqueducts made useless by hydraulics; fortifications, by gunpowder; roads and canals, by railways; sails, by steam; steam by electricity. You admire this tower of granite, weathering the hurts of so many ages. Yet a little waving hand built this huge wall, and that which builds is better than that which is built. The hand that built can topple it down much faster.
In later times they were connected with the aqueducts which came to the city from beyond Capranica. It is easy to account now for the number of gates on the east side of the city. True, this side of the wall lay away from the Campagna, and egress from gates on this side could not be seen by an enemy unless he moved clear across the front of the city.
For this purpose the engineer explores the whole country through which the canal is to pass, to find rivers and streams that he can turn into it, when the bed of it shall have been excavated; and sometimes he has to bring these supplies of water for a great distance in artificial channels, which often cross valleys by means of great aqueducts built up to hold them.
The traveller still meets, especially in the central regions of the table-land, with memorials of the past, remains of temples, palaces, fortresses, terraced mountains, great military roads, aqueducts, and other public works, which, whatever degree of science they may display in their execution, astonish him by their number, the massive character of the materials, and the grandeur of the design.
We shall see this strange creature, man, subjecting all nature to his will. He builds bridges, and he constructs aqueducts. He "goes down to the sea in ships," and variegates the ocean with his squadrons and his fleets.
One of the great causes of the decline of the Roman Empire was that the people of the Republic and of the first empire left nothing for their posterity to do; aqueducts, temples, forums, everything was supplied, and there were no objects to awaken activity, no necessity to stimulate their inventive faculties, and hardly any wants to call forth their industry. The Unknown.
Not one of these cisterns now contains water; the aqueducts which once communicated with them have entirely vanished. A single rivulet, across which one may easily step, flows beside these giant reservoirs. The region around is barren in the extreme.
In the minuter mechanical arts, both showed considerable skill; but in the construction of important public works, of roads, aqueducts, canals, and in agriculture in all its details, the Peruvians were much superior.
Discreetly hidden from vulgar eyes that delight in the architecture of the modern caravanserai, are the ruins of these older days Amphitheatres, Fountains, Temples, and Aqueducts of the Romans; the Castles, Abbeys, and Cathedrals of mediæval times.
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