1839-1845*] 
DRAINAGE OF BOGS. 
155 
various animal and vegetable substances that are left to 
putrefy as soon as the waters are exhaled by the sun. 
Bogs are not, as one might suppose, masses of putrefaction 
but, on the contrary, they are of such a texture as to resist 
putrefaction above any other substance we know of. I 
have seen a shoe neatly stitched taken out of a bog entirely 
fresh; from its fashion it must have been there some 
centuries. I have seen butter, called rouskin, which had 
been hid in hollow trunks of trees so long that it was 
become hard and almost friable, yet not devoid of unctu- 
osity ; the length of time it had been buried must have been 
very great, as ten feet of bog had grown over it. 
“ Captain Cook found peat water did not become putrid 
after being long kept in warm climates. The antiseptic 
quality of peat is imparted to water in which it has been 
infused, and extends to all substances that may chance to 
be buried in it. In the Phil. Trans, for 1747 is an account 
of the body of a woman found under a moss in Lincoln¬ 
shire, which from the antique sandals found on her feet 
had remained there for centuries ; yet the body had 
suffered nothing by corruption, the hair and nails were 
fresh as when living, the skin soft and strong, but had 
acquired a tawny colour—I should rather say, tanned. A 
human body was found twelve feet deep in the estate of 
Lord Moira. It was clothed in garments made of hair, 
and yet, though they must have been buried before the 
introduction of the use of wool, the body and clothes 
were no way impaired. A piece of cloth found ten feet 
deep in a moss at Glassford, Lanarkshire, was perfectly 
fresh and well preserved. In 1786 a woollen coat of coarse 
net-work was found in a bog at the depth of seventeen 
feet. . . . 
Ireland is inferior in fertility to England, because that 
which is the most productive of all our strata (the red marl) 
is in the far greater part of Ireland entirely wanting, and 
because it possesses not such districts as the marsh lands 
of Cambridge and Lincoln and the south of Yorkshire. It 
is true that, in passing from London to Holyhead, you see 
but little of our most prolific strata ; but cross the island 
