Of course, if some one had deliberately made hay with the lot, you would be nonplussed.

The chances are, however, that, given enough heaps of clothes, and bar intentional and systematic wrecking of them, you would be able to make out pretty well which boy preceded which; though you could hardly go on to say with any precision whether Tom preceded Dick by half a minute or half an hour.
Such is the method of pre-history.

It is called the stratigraphical method, because it is based on the description of strata, or layers.
Let me give a simple example of how strata tell their own tale.

It is no very remarkable instance, but happens to be one that I have examined for myself.

They were digging out a place for a gas-holder in a meadow in the town of St.Helier, Jersey, and carried their borings down to bed rock at about thirty feet, which roughly coincides with the present mean sea-level.