Peacock : The Soil Storehouse. 



229 



supplied. Their houses were on the driest spots, their camps 

 on elevated positions from which distant views could be 

 obtained. The hands which could fashion and use the huge 

 paleolith and chip the tiny flint arrow, with its two barbs and 

 tail, which a sixpence can wholly cover, were as capable as ours 

 are to-day. The man of the past knew the rich soils from the 

 poorer, the feeding- or holding- turf from the barren dunes. 

 Perforce, with the country more than half covered with thick or 

 open woods, their power of selection was not the same as ours 

 in a colony with open, rolling, treeless plains like the States or 

 South Africa, but they did know and select the good soil, the 

 clear and continuous spring, and sheltered spot for their homes. 

 As race has followed race in the stream of conquest, ages before 

 and ever since the Roman occupation, the same village site or 

 its immediate neighbourhood has been used over and over 

 again ; till, at last, through the lapse of time alone, the soil has 

 become a perfect storehouse of the history and civilisation of 

 the people who followed one another, as occupiers of the spot. 



There is no confusion of materials in a fairly deep arable 

 soil, or under old pasture and meadow land, even when they 

 show 'plough lines,' unless the ground has been opened and 

 levelled again by man. This is very often the case round 

 villages and small towns, and is practically always found to be 

 so in and around ancient cities like Lincoln and York. Where 

 camps have been stationed for a long time, or fortifications have 

 been thrown up, the soil records are much mixed and become 

 difficult to decipher. By careful observation, however, ' broken 

 ground ' can always be detected from an unmoved soil lying on 

 its mother-rock. The wall or vallum reveals the fact whether it 

 were stockaded or not, if trenches are cut across its surface in 

 a few places. The post-holes can be seen at once when the signs 

 are known.'"' The ditch of the fortress is not quite so easy 

 a matter, and much trench digging is required if all the facts 

 about it are to be ascertained. The water line, if there ever was 

 one, may be discovered by care in noting the presence or absence 

 of shells, seeds, and drift-wrack. Where the larger land shells 

 are most frequently found mixed with a few water species, the 

 drift line of the water most certainly came. The ditch may have 

 been waterless for a long period, and have been levelled by the 

 action of time and human agency ; it may even have been built 



* Post-holes of British date have been detected by Mr. J. R. Mortimer in 

 barrows on the Yorkshire wolds, plaster casts of which are preserved in 

 the Driffield Museum. — Eds. 



1904 August I. 



