Interest in the whole subject now rapidly increased, and extended to agriculturists and local observers. Yearly excavations were carefully scanned and even special researches were carried on in the interests of science. Strobel, a professed naturalist with remarkably precise and accurate habits, devoted his great energies to the elucidation of the organic remains, especially the rich and varied products of the peaty bed (_terra uliginosa_) at Castione, in which the piles were detected. Pigorini, on the other hand, was an archæologist pure and simple, but endowed with great ability and much fertility in the correlation and generalisation of facts--qualities which have since gained him the chair of archæology at Rome, which he now fills with so much distinction. Thus associated these two men may be said to have developed a new school of archæology, especially anent the terremare, having as its primary and indispensable object the collection of authenticated data, without which, they asserted, no deductions however brilliant could be scientific. In the course of researches conducted by Strobel at Castione, during the years 1862 and 1863, he observed that the piles were placed in a sort of basin, either natural or artificial; that they supported transverse beams over which clay floorings had been placed; and that they were more thickly set towards the margin, and slanting, as if to strengthen the inner superstructures. Moreover, he proved that the supposed peaty formation (_terra uliginosa_) had nothing in common with true peat, but was simply a subaqueous deposit of ordinary earth, associated with decomposed organic _débris_. Another terramara in Parma having similar characteristics to that at Castione was investigated in the following year by Pigorini, and thus the theory of an occasional palafitte converted into a land-dwelling seemed to them to be confirmed. Previous to this the stratification of the beds--one of the most remarkable features of these deposits--had not excited any unusual surprise, but now it began to be commented upon.