on the Coast of Tiree, S^c. 13j 



of the ocean, is neither a singular nor a rare fact, and that it is 

 connected with some extensively operating cause. 



DiiFerent naturalists having their attention more powerfully 

 directed towards one class of events, or towards another, have 

 accounted for these appearances accordingly. It sometimes 

 happens that one bed of earth or rock slides or passes over ano- 

 ther, thus changing their relative position, while their structure 

 remains unaltered. An event of this kind was observed * at 

 Solutre near Ma9on, where a mass of earth, loosened by heavy 

 rains, slid along the mountain of Solutre, for several hundred 

 yards, to the great hazard of the village, which it had nearly 

 reached ; and also a part of the mountain Goina, in the Vene- 

 tian States, on which several houses were built^ glided along 

 to the valley beneath, to the after-astonishment of the inhabi- 

 tants, whose sleep was not disturbed by the motion. At Folk- 

 stone in Norfolk f, some of the inhabitants attested, that they 

 considered that the land was yearly shding or pressing forwards 

 into the sea ; and the Reverend L. Lyon, who observed a sUp. 

 ping of the earth in that country in 1785, teUs us +, that water 

 running through a substratum of sand, had formed an arch of 

 the surface, and that some of the earth being loosened at the top 

 of the inclined plane, on which it was situated, pushed before it 

 the whole surface stratum, thus arched, to a considerable dis- 

 tance. 



There are excavations of this kind frequently made in the 

 ground by the united agency of frost and water which, after de- 

 priving the surface of its support, cause it to sink down or sub- 

 side. The waters of the Glommen in Norway, on their en- 

 trance into the North Sea, formed a cascade, which caused an 

 eddy below, that gradually wore away the bank, and formed a 

 subterranean lake, in which the castle of Borge, situated above 

 was engulfed in 1702, and nothing but a lake left. Malte 

 Brun II mentions several facts illustrative of such subsidence, 

 and thus accounts for the existence of submarine forests. 



But though Malte Brun founds his theory on antecedents 

 which prove the possibility of its truth, and though it could not 



• Malte Brun. Geol. vol. i. p. 434. + Phil. Trans. 



i Ditto, 1785. II Ibid. 429. 



