Owing to the meagreness of their food these animals are usually thin and small, but are quickly restored when placed on richer grounds.
Sheep were small and their fleeces light, nevertheless, owing to the meagreness of the yields of cereals' and the demand for wool for export, sheep-farming was looked to, as early as the 12th century, as the chief source of profit.
The meagreness of the results obtained by the occasional works executed in the last century, and the fact that the investigators were unfortunate enough to strike upon places already explored, gave rise to the opinion that the whole area of the city had been crossed by tunnels in the time of Charles III.
Considering the comparative meagreness of the Devonian record, we can scarcely doubt that the vegetation of that period, if adequately known, would prove to have been practically as rich as that of the succeeding age.
The rigorously authentic character of these laws, relating to, and dealing with, the actual realities of life, and with institutions and a state of society nowhere else revealed to the same extent, the extreme antiquity both of the provisions and of the language, and the meagreness of continental material illustrative of the same things, endow them with exceptional archaic, archaeological and philological interest.
