to the object of our researches. The mediæval excavator cared very little about antiquities as monuments of the past, and when, in digging a hole into the ground, he came upon a pavement, he broke it up without any scruple. It is to this cause, perhaps, that we must ascribe in many cases the damaged state in which we find the floors of the Roman houses, even when they lie at a considerable depth. I have thus endeavoured to explain the manner in which a Roman town like Uriconium was ruined; how its ruin remained several centuries untouched, while a depth of earth was accumulating on the floors; how at a later period the ruins themselves began to be cleared away, and a new accumulation of earth was formed over the lower part of the walls which had been left, until these could no longer be traced on the surface, except by the appearance of the crops in long periods of dry weather. This double accumulation of the debris of buildings has often led people to form erroneous conclusions, and in the account of a former partial excavation at Wroxeter, published by the Society of Antiquaries, the writer has fallen upon the rather odd notion that the Roman town had been burnt twice,—that he saw the layers of burnt materials from two successive burnings. The effects of all these causes may be seen in the excavations at Wroxeter,—the floor sometimes perfect and sometimes broken up; the walls of the houses remaining to the height of two or three feet or more, as they were left by the mediæval builders, when they carried away the upper part of these walls for material; the original level of the Roman town on which its inhabitants trod, strewed with roof-tiles and slates and other material which had fallen in during the conflagration under which the town sank into ruin, and the upper part of the soil mixed up with fragments of plaster and cement, bricks and mortar, which had been scattered about when the walls were broken up.