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With the building of good roads the primitive means of transport are being superseded by later methods; but these new means of porterage are examples of the latest mechanical developments, the centuries of slow transition have been skipped, and light railways already, and auto-cars, may in the immediate future follow closely on the heels of the old-time human beast of burden and his dumb companions.

By and by it came to be discovered that an animal could draw considerably greater weights than it could carry. A porter who goes short distances and returns unloaded can carry 135 pounds seven miles a day, but the same man can carry in a wheelbarrow 150 pounds ten miles a day, that is, half as much again.

When the red-skins of America shift camp they trail their tent-poles behind their horses, pack up all their goods and chattels in the skin tent, and tie the bundle on to the poles. They are then free to move wherever they choose. Even the dogs may be employed to carry smaller loads on trailing stakes. This is a natural device, but one wonders how these nomad hunters managed in the horseless pre-Columbian days.

Captain Burt, in his celebrated Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to his Friend in London (1754), gives an illustration of a vehicle consisting of two poles drawn by a small, ill-kempt pony. The body of the cart is formed by two pieces of wood bent in a semi-circle, the ends of which are fastened to the shafts, the one close behind the pony and the other a little distance behind, and the arches are steadied at the top by a piece of wood running from the one to the other. Thin pieces of wood, osiers perhaps, pass at intervals across the floor and ends of this very primitive contrivance.

Sir Arthur Mitchell found at Strathglass, Kintail, and

elsewhere, in the years 1863 and 1864, carts in use without wheels exactly of the kind just described; these are figured by Dr. Mitchell in his suggestive book, The Past in the Present.

If this vehicle has died out in Wales it must have done so very recently; at all events it is still in full use in certain. parts of Ireland, notably in the Glens of Antrim.

On looking at the illustrations it will be seen that the Irish slide-car is primitive enough. Two shafts are harnessed

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on to a horse, and the ends which drag on the ground are shod with short runners or shoes; sometimes the runners lie their whole length on the ground, or more generally they are tilted up so as to have pretty much the same slant as the shafts (Plate III). These runners, which do not appear in the figures given by Sir Arthur Mitchell, are a useful addition, as they save the lower ends of the shafts from wear and tear. The shafts are kept apart by cross-bars. In one car in Plate III., 2, three holes are seen in the last crossbar, in which upright stakes can be inserted, as in the car in the background of Plate IV., Fig. 1, to retain the corn or the whins (as furze is called in Ireland) from slipping down behind. The lashing of a wicker basker or creel on to the shafts is an obvious step in advance, and these are used to

bring down potatoes from the fields or turfs from the mountain. The straw harness in the lower figure of Plate III. is an interesting survival, and that, combined with the slidecar, carries us back to very primitive times.

The modern Irish name for this wheelless cart is the same as the old Gaelic name, Carr Sliunain. Dr. Sullivan'states

that there is no reason to suppose that the Irish Carr is a loan-word from the Latin Carrus, the stem Car being probably common to the Latin, the Germanic, and the Celtic languages.

The Irish warrior of ancient times habitually carried a couple of spears, and a native poet, singing of the pursuit of a certain warrior, tells us that

"The track of his two spears through the marsh

Was like the ruts of a car over weak grassy stubbles."

The phrase" weak grassy stubbles" refers to the rich. after-grass of soft meadows. This is perhaps the first reference to the slide-car.

Dr. Mitchell strikes a note of warning that is, perhaps, not unneeded.

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"When I saw," he says, what these carts were employed in doing, namely, transporting peats, ferns, and hay from high grounds down very steep hills entirely without roads, I saw that the contrivance was admirably adapted for its purpose, and that wheeled carts would have been useless for that work. But I saw more than this; I saw that these carts were used, doing the exact analogue of what is done every day in the advanced south. When boulders, for instance, are removed on sledges from the fields in which they have been turned up; when trees are transported on sledges from the high grounds on which they have been cut; when a heavily laden lorry puts on the drag as it comes down

1 W. K. Sullivan, Introduction to E. O'Curry, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish, 1873, i., p. cccclxxvi. 2 Loc. cit., p. ccccxliii.

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FIG. 1. Slide-Car, County Antrim; from a photograph by Welch.

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FIG. 2.

Slide-Car, County Antrim; from a photograph by the Author.

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