335 
i88s.] Vegetable Soil . 
of about 2 inches. These large casts are evidently due to 
the mild weather, because as fast as the earth is thrown up 
the grass grows in it and prevents it being carried away by 
rain, runlets, or the wind; thus each cast appears to represent 
the entire work for the season (four months). For the four 
months’ work in this field there has been an average of 
about 44 cubic inches to the square foot cast up, and if we 
suppose that on account of the exceptional year this is ten 
times the average we would have for ordinary years about 
4 cubic inches to the square foot, which multiplied by 30, as 
the land was laid down about the year 1850, would give 120 
cubic inches to the square foot, or about 075 of an inch 
added to the depth of the vegetable soil in thirty years. 
The worm work in this field, as just pointed out, was exces- 
sive, so that probably 0*5 inch in the thirty years would be 
more corredt. In either case if Dr. Darwin’s theory is 
corredt, the worm work ought now to give a considerable 
depth of soil, but what is rarely the case, the soil on these 
hill slopes rarely exceeds 3 or 4 inches in depth and often is 
less, and this has been the average depth for fifty years or 
more, the vegetable growth and decay being at a minimum. 
Furthermore, on following down the worm burrows they are 
found to be systems of nearly horizontal burrows backwards 
and forwards through the vegetable soil immediately over, 
and in no case penetrating into, the subsoil. As I pointed 
out in one of my previous papers, the Irish tillers of the soil 
usually cultivate over and over again only one stratum, and 
in this area it is found that in the more recently laid down 
land the worm burrows are principally at the bottom of that 
stratum, immediately above the subsoils, as if their tunnels 
had been made in, and in search of the decayed vegetable 
matter due to the turned down surfaces of the old sods. 
The fadfs observed would seem to suggest that the worms 
do not take from the subsoil to add it to the overlying 
stratum, but that they rearrange, over and over again, the 
vegetable soil. These notes specially refer to the slopes of 
the hills adjoining (jlenow, but from the observations made 
they are also more or less applicable to the whole of the 
County of Wexford, and part of the County of Wicklow, 
let it be upland or lowland, the latter naturally having a 
greater depth of vegetable soil in which only the worms 
tunnel, unless its depth is increased by artificial means. 
During the last week in March, 1882, I explored an arti- 
ficial mound in a prehistoric feartha or burial place ; worms 
were in the first spit (about 6 inches), but under it there 
were none — so much so, that one of the men remarked 
