418 On the Bed of the German Ocean and British Channel, &?c, 



some years ago, of an immense quantity of these extiaoydinary 

 . .chalk cliffs, the ruins of which appeared to cover several acres 

 of ground, and must have contained many thousands of tons. 

 A fail of this kind, near Beachyhcad, on the Sussex coast, is 

 noticed in a paper by Mr. Webster in the Transactions of the 

 Geological Society, The portion which gave way extended 300 

 feet in length, and was 70 or 80 feet in breadth. A clergyman 

 who happened at the moment to be walking on the spot, ob- 

 serving the ground giving wav, had just time to escape when the 

 whole fell down with a dreadful crash. In the same manner the 

 opposite coast of France is understood to be acted upon ; and 

 the numerous islands lying off that coast and the coasts of Ger- 

 many and Holland. I might also extend these observations to 

 the shores of Hampshire, Dorset, Devon, Cornwall, particularly 

 to the i'iles of Wight and Portland, and the Scilly islands ; the 

 wasting of the land and the encroachment of the sea being every^ 

 where remarkal)le, and always in proportion to the nature of the 

 strata or rocks composing the coast, whether alluvial, chalk, 

 limestone,- sandstone, or granite. 



Nor are these effects of the sea confined to the shores of the 

 German Ocean and the British Channel ; for the wasting of the 

 land is no less remarkable in St. George's Channel and the Irish 

 Sea, including the coast of Ireland on the one side, and, on the 

 other, the shores of Wales, Lancashire, Westmoreland, and the 

 counties of Dumfries, Kirkcudbright, and Galloway, where nei- 

 ther the rocky coasts, and exposed situations of the islands of 

 Anglesea, Man, Copland, Craig of Ailsa, and the islands of Cum- 

 brae, nor the sheltered and alluvial shores of the Bristol Channel, 

 are exempted : even the indentations of the coast at Dublin Bay, 

 Liverpool, and Lancaster, and the more extensive friths of tlie 

 Solvvay and the Clyde, are subject to the unvarying destructive 

 effects of the sea. 



Having pointed out, from actual observation on about one-half 

 of the coast of Ireland, and on ail parts of the shores of Great 

 Britain, from the Scilly islands, its southern extremity, to the 

 Naze of Unst, or northerinnost point of Shetland, that the land, 

 on the margin of the sheltered bays and friths of our coast, as 

 well as on the most exposed promontories and open shores, is un- 

 dergoing the process of waste and decay from the impulse and 

 action of the sea, I shall in a future paper endeavour to show, 

 that the cause of this effect, particularly on the shores of the 

 German Ocean and British Chaimcl, is, in a good measure, ow- 

 ing to the immense quantity of debris which must be accumu- 

 lating, at least to a certain depth, in the bottom of the ocean. 



This paper is circulated, with a view of obtaining additional 

 {"acts regarding the wasting of the shores of Great Britain and 



those 



