386 
Vegetable Soil . 
July, 
weather, they being few when it was dry and not favourable 
for the worms to travel, and numerous when it was damp or 
after rain. New mortar worms abhor ; dry mortar rubbish, 
such as you get if you pull down an old house, they do not 
appear to care for ; but rotten mortar, such as you get in 
buried ancient structures, they delight in. This appears due 
to the chemical changes that have taken place. I knew a 
gentleman in the county of Longford whose house was next 
the old ruin of a mill, which he pulled down, and on its site, 
in the old mortar rubbish, he planted a strawberry bed : this 
bed for some years would not breed a worm or slug, but after 
a time, when it had rotted, they came there as elsewhere. 
The mortar rubbish has part of the sting of the lime left in 
it ; but the rotten mortar in prehistoric structures is now a 
lime soil, besides being more or less impregnated with vege- 
table or animal matter imbibed from the rubbish that has 
filled in and buried the ruin ; the worms therefore, as soon 
as they can get at it, burrow into it, let it be in the perpen- 
dicular walls or in the floor. This, however, is not the case 
always, as in some of these old mortars, before they are 
opened up to atmospheric influences, I suspeCt the worms 
could not burrow, because in such cases I have observed 
that the freshly uncovered mortar is perfectly hard until it 
has been exposed to the air for a few days, when it disinte- 
grates and becomes quite friable. 
Worms are wonderful workers, but, as I have already 
said, I cannot believe that — except rarely — they work below 
the vegetable mould, and therefore they cannot increase the 
soil in depth. Their great use appears to be in old grass 
land, where they bring up the mould from among the roots 
of the plants and top-dress them with it, because, as I 
pointed out years ago, if you break up grass land you will 
find the old tillage floor intact , although it may have been buried 
for years. The ploughmen of Wexford and Wicklow will 
show you the floor that their fathers, grandfathers, and great- 
grandfathers tilled on, and a man who would break through 
this floor and bring up the “yallar ” ground (clay), or sub- 
soil, is considered a bad ploughman. They all have a firm 
belief that if they bring up the “yallar,” or go into the 
gravel, they spoil the land ; this, however, is not a question 
to be discussed here. 
In conclusion I would refer to some deepeners of the soil 
whose work I have not seen elsewhere recorded, and these 
are the large copper-coloured and blue beetles called respect- 
ively “ cockchafers ” and “ bumbly bees.” The last I have 
observed this spring in great numbers on the wild hill-slopes 
