Inferring the Hydraulic Properties of a Historical Soil: A Revisiting of Perrault's Experiments

In his classical work published in 1674, Pierre Perrault presented four sets of experiments about the water circulation in the subsoil, which are recognized as one of the seminal contribution to the experimental hydrology. With the aim of deepening the knowledge of Perrault's experiments, and of testing the performance, in scarcity of experimental data, of a water flow conceptualisation based on the Richards equation and on soil—water constitutive laws, one of the reported experiments, the richest in quantitative details, was numerically re—analysed. As a result of the deductions inferred from the data and of the simulations, estimates of the hydraulic properties of Perrault's soil are provided.