What did Adam Sedgwick mean by "tra-road"? In _Life and Letters of Charles Darwin_ , volume 2, Darwin's friend Adam Sedgwick wrote in a letter to him (dated 24th December 1859) about his then new book _The Origin of Species_ : > Parts of it I admired greatly, parts I laughed at till my sides were almost sore; other parts I read with absolute sorrow, because I think them utterly false and grievously mischievous. You have DESERTED—after a start in that **tra-road** of all solid physical truth—the true method of induction, and **started us in machinery** as wild, I think, as Bishop Wilkins's locomotive that was to sail with us to the moon. Many of your wide conclusions are based upon assumptions which can neither be proved nor disproved, why then express them in the language and arrangement of philosophical induction? I found that the prefix "tra" is a variant of "trans", but I still can't get the meaning of "trans-road of ..." nor the meaning of "started us in machinery"

Whenever I see something weird in a transcribed book at Gutenberg.org, I try to find a scan of the original. This one turns out to be a bad OCR. The word is **tram-road** , a road for wheeled carts. The sentence reads:

> You have _deserted_ —after a start in that tram-road of all solid physical truth—the true method of induction...

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