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THE TOPOGRAPHER

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ROAD BOOK OF SCOTLAND.


Tourists will never cease to remember their obligations to Mr. Leigh, the
publisher of this pretty little volume. He has done so much for their
gratification in his New Pocket Road Books, (of which series the present
work is one,) that their success ought to be toasted in all the delightful
retreats to which they act as _ciceroni_. In his Road Book of England and
Wales, he has done what Mr. Peel is now doing with our old Acts of
Parliament--consolidating their worth, and rejecting their obsoleteness.
For our own part, one of the greatest bugbears of books is the Road Book on
the old system: it is all long columns of small type, in which we lose our
way as in the cross-roads of the last century--all direction-posts and
"_Vides_," puzzle upon puzzle, Pelion on Ossa, and Ossa on Pelion--crabbed
and complex abbreviations, with which we get acquainted at the end of our
journey. They contain nothing like direct information, and the only people
who appear to understand them are postmasters and innkeepers, and some
old-established bagmen, whose interests and heads will give you a clearer
view of the roads than all the itineraries ever printed. It was, however,
but reasonable to expect that the Macadamization of roads, or the mending