[269] Mr. E. Tylor in his Presidential address (‘Journal of the Anthropological Institute,’ May 1880, p. 451) remarks: “It appears from several papers of the Berlin Society as to the German ‘high-fields’ or ‘heathen-fields’ (Hochäcker, and Heidenäcker) that they correspond much in their situation on hills and wastes with the ‘elf-furrows’ of Scotland, which popular mythology accounts for by the story of the fields having been put under a Papal interdict, so that people took to cultivating the hills. There seems reason to suppose that, like the tilled plots in the Swedish forest which tradition ascribes to the old ‘hackers,’ the German heathen-fields represent tillage by an ancient and barbaric population.”
[284] White of Selborne has some good remarks on the service performed by worms in loosening, &c., the soil. Edit, by L. Jenyns, 1843, p. 281.
[285] ‘Zeitschrift für wissenschaft. Zoolog.’ B. xxviii. 1877, p. 360.