BURIED FORESTS. 173 



I am not unaware that the burying of the forest may be 

 otherwise accounted for; but I consider this suggestion 

 deserving of consideration, being in accordance with what 

 is even now going on. 



Mr. White, in the volume cited, supplies statements of 

 other facts which it is interesting to study in view of what 

 has been advanced : " Remarkable appearances," says he, 

 "are presented by the cliffs to the south of the northern end 

 of the Barnstowe drain. Here the clay is cracked in such a 

 way as to resemble nothing so much as a pile of huge brown 

 loaves ; now it falls away into a hollow, patched with rough 

 grass ; now it juts again, so full of perpendicular cracks 

 that you liken it to a mass of starch ; now it is grooved by 

 a deep gully ; now a buttress terminates in a crumbling 

 pyramid, mottled with yellow ; now it is a rude stair, 

 six great steps only to the summit ; now a point of 

 which you would say the extremity has been shaped by 

 turf cutters ; now a wall of pebbles, hundreds of thousands 

 of all sizes, the largest equal in bigness to a child's head ; 

 now a shattered ruin fallen in a confused heap. Such are 

 some of the appearances left by the waves in their never- 

 ending aggressions." 



From the Spurn on to Whitby, if not also further, like 

 appearances are presented by the cliffs. At places the 

 waves are undermining them, this is followed by a land- 

 slip ; the debris is washed away by currents and deposited 

 where such currents exhaust themselves, it may be 

 encountering others going in a different direction. Some 

 idea of the enormous quantity of mud which thus enters the 

 Humber may be formed from the fact that fifty thousand 

 tons of mud have been dredged in one year from the docks 

 and basins at Hull ; and in that river may be seen the 

 effect of spring tides, which rise twenty-two feet and rush 

 in with a stream at the rate of five miles an hour, clearing 

 the mud and shifting it from one place to another. Above 

 Hull the channel is shifting constantly and with great 

 rapidity, so that a " pilot may find the channel by which 



