Chapter I

, “Custom and Convention,” 53-84; see also 110, 333.

PUENTE DE SAN MARTIN at Toledo, 287-8.

PUENTE LA REINA, 27 _footnote_.

PUENTE NUEVO at Ronda, 280, and _footnote_.

PUENTE TRAJAN over the Tagus at Alcántara, 6, 153, 183, 186, 212, 321.

PUL-I-KAISAR at Shushter in Persia, 202-4.

PUL-I-KÂREDJ in Persia, 265-6.

PUL-I-KHAJU at Isfahan, 212-16.

PUL-I-MARNUN at Isfahan, 212; see also “Persian Bridges” and “Ali Verdi Khan.”

PULISANGAN, China, 310-12.

PULTENEY, WILLIAM, his bridge at Bath, 221.

PURITANS, their enmity to chapelled bridges and to wayside shrines, 230, 233 _et seq._

PYRENEES, FRENCH, great bridges there, 278-80.

QUAKERS, their attitude to the strife that bridges and roads circulate, 35-6.

QUALITIES OF A GREAT BRIDGE, 320.

QUICKSANDS OF CHEAPNESS, 48.

RABOT, THE, at Ghent, a fortified bridge and lock, 289, 291.

RAILWAY BRIDGES, often detestable, 5, 77, 78; conventional arguments which have governed their structure, 77; the High Level Bridge at Newcastle, 79-81; the Tay Bridge and its disaster, 339-42; the Forth Bridge, 350; the Illinois and St. Louis Bridge over the Mississippi, 352-3; the Great Portage Bridge over the Genesee River, 353-4. Many railway bridges over strategical rivers can be displaced by tunnels, but many others must be armoured with cone-shaped roofs as a protection against overhead wars from airships and aeroplanes, 358. See Albi Railway Bridge, the plate facing page 8, and Cannon Street Railway Bridge, the plate facing page 48.

RAMESES II, TEMPLE OF, at Abydos, has a primitive vault built with horizontal courses of stone, showing its descent from the rock archways made by Nature, 155.

REFINEMENT, a quality often overdone in British art, 168.

REICHENAU, JOHN GRUBENMANN’S BRIDGE AT, 142.

RELIEF BAYS FOR FLOOD WATER, they were introduced by the Romans, 284, and were copied by mediæval bridgemen; witness the Pont des Consuls at Montauban, 255, 256, and the Pont St. Esprit, 293, 297. Pontists should note both the difference of shape in flood-water bays and the variation of their position in the architecture. At Mérida, for example, in the great squat Roman bridge, they are long and round-headed, and rise from the low and bold cutwaters, which are overgrown with grey-green mosses and grass. On the other hand, a Moorish bridge of four arches near Tangier has much smaller relief bays with round heads, and they are pierced high up through the spandrils. They look like three little windows that give light and air to a work of sun-bleached antiquity. Moreover, their shape is repeated in about a dozen little holes cut through the base of the parapet, perhaps to help in the drainage of the roadway, perhaps to be useful in military defence. This Moorish bridge has semicircular arches, and the road is inclined over each abutment, just like the Roman bridge at Rimini. But the technical sentiment is less virile than the Roman.

RELIGIOUS EMBLEMS OR SYMBOLS on Historic Bridges, such as the Phallus on the Pont du Gard, 174; the Janus heads on the Pons Fabricius, 196; the idol or image on the Chinese bridge at Shih-Chuan, 247; and the cross and crucifix on Gothic bridges of the Middle Ages, 96, 230, 246. The symbolic lion and tortoise on the Chinese bridge of Pulisangan were borrowed from the _singa_ and _Kûrma_ of Hindu mythology, 311 _footnote_. I should like the cross to be raised again on all bridges in unfortified towns, as a protest against a Teutonic misuse of flying warfare.

RENAISSANCE, THE, and its Genius, in the war-bridge at Würzburg, Bavaria, 259; in Venetian bridges, 211-12, 307, 315-16; in the bastille bridge at Châtellerault, 331-4; in the gradual decline of bridges from military forethought into a complete disregard for national defence, 336-44; in wasteful artistry such as redundant ornament and too elaborate parapets, 320, 321, 322, 324, 325, 326.

RENNIE, GEORGE, his design for London New Bridge has defects of scale, 256, 257.

RENNIE, JOHN, _b._ 1761--d. 1821, his poor bridge over the Thames at Southwark was financed by a Company, not by the City, as if London were a trivial village with some new industries that needed encouragement, 326-7.

RENNIE, SIR JOHN, son of John Rennie and brother of George Rennie, was the acting engineer during the building of New London Bridge, according to Professor Fleeming Jenkin.

RESEARCH, its illimitable scope in the study of bridges, 3-13.

RHÔNE, THE RIVER, his two famous old bridges, the Pont St. Bénézet and the Pont St. Esprit, both constructed by the _Frères Pontifes_, or Pontist Brothers. See Brangwyn’s pictures and the text.

RIALTO, Venice, 209, 211-12.

RIBBED ARCHES, like those in the Monnow Bridge at Monmouth, 281, and the Pont de Vernay at Airvault, Deux-Sèvres, plate facing page 96. The introduction of ribbed vaulting into English churches and bridges, 93-100. Professor Moseley’s remarks on groined or ribbed arches may be quoted here from Hann and Hosking’s profuse volumes. “The groin ... is nothing more than an arch whose voussoirs vary as well in breadth as in depth. The centres of gravity of the different elementary voussoirs of this mass lie all in its plane of symmetry. Its line of resistance is therefore in that plane.... Four groins commonly spring from one abutment; each _opposite_ pair being addossed, and each _adjacent_ pair uniting their margins. Thus they lend one another mutual support, partake in the properties of a dome, and form a continued covering. The groined arch is of all arches the most stable; and could materials be found of sufficient strength to form its abutments and the parts about its springing, I am inclined to think that it might be built safely of any required degree of flatness, and that spaces of enormous dimensions might readily be covered by it.” Yet “modern builders, whilst they have erected the common arch on a scale of magnitude nearly approaching perhaps the limits to which it can be safely carried, have been remarkably timid in the use of the groin.” Progress may be compared to a dilatory army that ever fails to march forward with all its needed units.

RICHMOND BRIDGE, Yorkshire, had a chapel, 231.

RIMINI, her Roman bridges, 82, 199, 200, 220.

RING OF AN ARCH, the compressed arc of voussoirs, 264; the lower surface of a ring is called the soffit of an arch. In some bridges the voussoirs form a double or a triple ring, 305, and _footnote_. Two very fine bridges of this sort, in my collection of photographs, are the Pont de Vernay at Airvault, 12th century, and the Pont Saint-Généroux over the Thouët, also in Deux-Sèvres, 13th and 14th centuries. Another monument to be studied is the reputed Roman bridge at Viviers over the Rhône, built mainly with small materials. Whether Roman or Romanesque, the structure of the arches has great interest, and a large photograph is sold by Neurdein, 52 Avenue de Breteuil, Paris.

RIVERS, how their violence has given lessons to bridge-builders, 181.

ROADS, ANCIENT BRITISH, 22; Roman, 139, and _footnote_; they and bridges circulate all the strife in the overland enterprise of mankind, 4, 14-52; types of society are as old as their systems of circulation, just as women and men are as old as their arteries, 13; mediæval roads in England, 51, 52. Many of them were a survival of the Roman empire, in which the construction of highways was a military and political necessity. The genuinely mediæval roads connected new towns with the main or ancient thoroughfares, which had traversed Roman Britain from her principal colonies, London and York, to the other settlements. “The roads of England,” says Thorold Rogers, “are roughly exhibited in a fourteenth century map still preserved in the Bodleian Library, and are identical with many of the highways which we know familiarly. In time these highways fell out of repair, and were put in the eighteenth century under the Turnpike Acts, when they were repaired. But comparatively little of the mileage of English roads is modern. What has been constructed has generally been some shorter and easier routes, for in the days of the stage-coaches it was highly expedient to equalize the stages.”

ROANNE, PONT DE, its length and its cost, 356.

ROBIN HOOD BALLADS, their rustic charm is repeated in some old English bridges, 9, 44.

ROCHE PERCÉE, LA, at Biarritz, natural arched opening, 151.

ROCHE TROUÉE, LA, near Saint-Gilles Croix-de-Vie, 151.

ROCHESTER BRIDGE and her Chapel, 243-6.

ROCK-BASINS, their formation by the erosive power of glaciers, 152, and _footnote_.

ROCK-BRIDGES, or bridges made by Nature, 6, and _footnote_, 150-3.

ROGERS, THOROLD, PROFESSOR, on mediævalism and industrialism, 47; on mediæval roads, 52; see also “Roads.”

ROMAN GATEWAYS to defend bridges, 176-7, 272.

ROMAN GENIUS, 23-5, 26-7, 30, and