We will study the cultivated sands first. As sand is not good plant food (p. 43) these soils want a lot of manure, and so are not good for ordinary farmers. But they are very easy to cultivate--for which reason they {104} are called light soils--and can be dug at any time; seeds can be sown early, and early crops can be got. Consequently these soils are very useful for men doing special work like fattening winter and spring sheep, or producing special crops like fruit or potatoes, and for market gardeners who grow all sorts of vegetables, carrots, parsnips, potatoes, peas, and so on. Fig. 47 is a view of a highly cultivated sandy region in Kent showing gooseberries in the foreground, vegetables behind, and a hop garden behind that again. [Illustration: Fig. 48. A Surrey heath] The uncultivated sands are sometimes not really so very different, and some of them, perhaps many of them, might be improved or reclaimed and made to grow these special crops if it were worth while. But they always require special treatment and therefore they have been left alone. In days of old our ancestors disliked them very much; "villanous, rascally heaths" Cobbett always called them. There were practically no villages and few cottages, because the land was too barren to produce enough food; the few dwellers on the heath, or the "heathen," were so ignorant and benighted that the name came to stand generally for all such people and has remained in our language long after its original meaning was lost. As there were so few inhabitants the heaths used to be great places for robbers, highwaymen, and evil-doers generally; Gad's Hill on the Watling St. between Rochester and Gravesend, Finchley Common, Hounslow Heath and others equally dreaded by travellers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were barren sandy tracts. But in our time we no longer need to dread them; we can enjoy the infinite charm of the breezy, open country with its brown vegetation, the pink blossom of the bell-shaped heath and the lilac blossom of the {106} heather, the splashes of yellow from the ragwort or the gorse and the dark pine and larch plantations. In the spring the young shoots of bracken lend a beautiful light green colour to the scene, while in the autumn the faded growth covers it all with a rich brown. People now like to live amid such surroundings, and so these heaths, that have been untouched for so long and are part of the original primeval England as it was in the days of the Britons, are becoming dotted with red bricked and red tiled villas, and are fast losing their ancient character. The heaths are not everywhere dry; there are numerous clay basins where the sand lies wet, where peat forms (see p. 37), and where marsh plants like the bog asphodel, sundew, or cotton grass can be found. In walking over a heath you soon learn to find these wet places by the colour of the grass and the absence of heather. In some places there is a good deal of wood,