the London and Hampshire Basins. 



283 



Atherfield beds consisted of a series of loose porous sands and 

 clays of no great thickness, interposed between the green sand- 

 stone and the top of the Weald clay ; and that it was by the 

 removal of these loose materials, during the act of denudation, 

 that these large masses of stone had been let down as we now 

 see them. 



To produce this effect to so remarkable a degree at this point, 

 two circumstances have combined, — the sharpness of the angle 

 when the denudation was brought down to this part of the river 

 fissure, and the projection of the greensand country as before- 

 mentioned into the Bedham Hills ; which rise at least 500 feet 

 immediately west of the river, and would cause the flood of de- 

 nudation in the flux and reflux of its wave to impinge violently 

 on this particular spot. I here repeat with a little variation my 

 original sketch of the downcast I have endeavoured to describe*. 



Possessed with the justness of this interpretation of these ap- 

 pearances, I have for comparison examined some of the salient 

 points of the greensand escarpment on the other side of the 

 Weald, and have not been disappointed. I pass over many 

 minor indications of the like kind of dislocation and dilaceration 

 in the hollow ways and small stone pits of the Hartingcombe 

 and Haslemere country, to mention the highly illustrative stone 

 quarry now open at Nore Farm, at the eastern extremity of the 

 Hasscomb Hills f. The Bargate stone beds (as the corresponding 

 greensand stone of this side of the Weald is called) are not quite 

 so low in the series as the Pulborough stone, or the Kentish- 

 rag, and do not lie so close on the Atherfield beds. Never- 

 theless they have been extensively warped and tossed about by 

 the removal of the looser and more destructible materials, and 



* The dislocation has none of the character of an " under cliff," or of 

 the "Hawksley slip" described in White's ' Selbome/ Letter 45, but sweeps 

 round the angle of the eminence, and is CAddently produced by the subsi- 

 dence of the mass of stone, as the loose mate^als were removed from below. 



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