29(5 DENUDATION OF THE LAND. Chap. V£ 



wards discovered to have been ploughed only 

 50 or 60 years before. During the early 

 part of the present century, when the price 

 of corn was very high, land of all kinds seems 

 to have been ploughed in Britain. There is, 

 however, no reason to doubt that in many 

 cases the old crowns and furrows have been 

 preserved from a very ancient period.* That 

 they should have been preserved for very 

 unequal lengths of time would naturally 

 follow from the crowns, when first thrown 

 up, having differed much in height in dif- 

 ferent districts, as is now the case with 

 recently ploughed land. 



In old pasture fields, the mould, wherever 

 measurements were made, was found to be 

 from J to 2 inches thicker in the furrows than 



* Mr. E. Tylor in his Presidential address ('Journal of the 

 Anthropological Institute,' May 1880, p. 451) remarks: "Jt 

 appears from several papers of the Berlin Society as to the 

 German 'high-fields' or 'heathen-fields' (Hochacker, and 

 Heidenacker) that they correspond much in their situation on hills 

 and wastes with the 'elf-furrows' of Scotland, which popular 

 mythology accounts for by the story of the fields having been 

 put under a Papal interdict, so that people took to cultivating 

 the hills. There seems reason to suppose that, like the tilled 

 plots in the Swedish forests which tradition ascribes to the old 

 ' hackers,' the German heathen-fields represent tillage by an 

 ancient and barbaric population." 



