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By the Rev. Canon Jackson, F.8.A. 293 
the more regular stairs. The vineyard explanation will hardly apply 
to these, and in short, as a general account of Wiltshire lynchets, I 
for one, cannot accept it. 
Well, then we are told that. if not for vineyards, still they are 
artificial, and have been made, formed by art and the hand and 
labour of man, for agricultural purposes of other kinds, for which 
arable land is wanted. 
This, again, may be perfectly. true of some of them, and indeed I 
have been told by more than one friend that they have known such 
a terrace made by continual ploughing. But before any person 
forms a decided opinion, or any opinion at all upon the subject, only 
let him go about and carefully examine, not one or two, but a large 
number, over a wide surface of country. He will find the shapes 
and directions of these terrace-banks most perplexing in their 
variety. Sometimes they are very strongly marked; sometimes 
very faintly. Sometimes they run, not horizontally across, but 
downwards from. the top to.the bottom. This is the case at Heale. 
I remember Mr. Fane once showing me at Boyton a very remarkable 
specimen, a long winding. hollow slope, falling gradually from the 
top of the down into the vale. The floor of this sloping descent was: 
arable, and alongside of it, on each side a few feet above it, was a, 
grass terrace walk, looking, for all the world, like an artificial grass 
path. He challenged me to explain it. I could only suggest the 
same origin as I shall venture to do for the greater part of the rest. 
Sometimes, when looking at a set of these terraces, you will notice 
that in the centre they are rather thicker, thinning off towards the 
end on either side, meeting sometimes at the end in one point, like 
four or five blades of a fan, and dying away imperceptibly into the 
hill. Sometimes, I am told, though I do not happen myself to have 
‘seen it, they appear on opposite sides of a hollow or valley, exactly 
corresponding with one-another. Wherever that occurs, a geologist 
- would say the strata now opposite were once joined, and that the 
intervening part has vanished. One thing is specially to be noted,. 
that they generally follow the outline ‘of the main hill on the side 
_ of which they are found, which at once makes it probable that both 
they and the hill received their shapes at one and the same time, 
