What is the soil made of? 



clay pits can be found; if we ask wliat sort of soil this is 

 we are told it is a loam. A gravel soil will be known 

 at once by its gravel pits, and a chalk soil by the white 

 chalk quarries and old lime kilns, while a peat soil is 

 black, sometimes marshy and nearly always spongey to 

 tread on. 



We want to learn something of the soil round about 

 us, and we will begin by digging a hole about three feet 

 deep to see what we can discover. At Harpenden this 

 is what the scholars saw : — the top eight inches of soil 

 was dark in colour and easy to dig ; the soil below was 

 reddish brown in colour and very hard to dig; one 



Surface soil 



Dark coloured 



Easy to dig 



Subsoil 



Reddish-brown 



Hard to dig 



Fig. 1. 

 Soil and subsoil in St George's school garden 



changed into the other so quickly that it was easy to 

 see where the top soil ended and the bottom soil began; 

 no further change could, however, be seen below the 

 eight inch line. A drawing was made to show these 

 things, and is given in Fig. 1. You may find something 

 quite different: sand, chalk, or solid rock may occur 

 below the soil, but you should enter whatever you see 

 into your notebooks and make a drawing, like Fig. 1, to 

 be kept for future use. Before filling in the hole some 

 of the dark coloured top soil, and some of the lighter 

 coloured soil lying below (which is called the subsoil), 



