322 The Natural History of Selborne 



The perpendicular height of the precipice in general is twenty- 

 three yards ; the length of the lapse or slip as seen from the fields 

 below, one hundred and eighty-one ; and a partial fall, concealed in 

 the coppice, extends seventy yards more ; so that the total length of 

 this fragment that fell was two hundred and fifty-one yards. About 

 fifty acres of land suffered from this violent convulsion ; two houses 

 were entirely destroyed ; one end of a new barn was left in ruins, 

 the walls being cracked through the very stones that composed them ; 

 a hanging coppice was changed to a naked rock ; and some grass 

 grounds and an arable field so broken and rifted by the chasms as to 

 be rendered for a time neither fit for the plough or safe for pastur- 

 age, till considerable labour and expense had been bestowed in level- 

 ling the surface and filling in the gaping fissures. 1 



1 In this letter White shows himself prophetic of Lyell's famous doctrine 

 that geological phenomena are due, not to mighty cataclysms, but to the slow result 

 of causes still in action. ED. 



