OF SELBORNE. 341 



yet, as it was within the hundred of Selborne, and as 

 the circumstances were singular, may fairly claim a 

 place in a work of this nature. 



The months of January and February, in the year 

 1774, were remarkable for great melting snows and 

 vast gluts of rain; so that by the end of the latter 

 month the land-springs, or lavants, began to prevail, 

 and to be near as high as in the memorable winter of 

 1764. The beginning of March also went on in the 

 same tenor; when, in the night between the 8th and 

 9th of that month, a considerable part of the great 

 woody hairger at Hawkley was torn from its place, and 

 fell down, leaving a high free-stone cliff naked and bare, 

 and resembling the steep side of a chalk-pit. It ap- 

 pears that this huge fragment, being perhaps sapped 

 and undermined by waters, foundered, and was ingulfed, 

 going down in a perpendicular direction; for a gate 

 which stood in the field, on the top of the hill, after 

 sinking with its posts for thirty or forty feet, remained 

 in so true and upright a position as to open and shut 

 with great exactness, just as in its first situation. 

 Several oaks also are still standing, and in a state of 

 vegetation, after taking the same desperate leap. That 

 great part of this prodigious mass was absorbed in 

 some gulf below is plain also from the inclining ground 

 at the bottom of the hill, which is free and unincum- 

 bered ; but would have been buried in heaps of rubbish, 

 had the fragment parted and fallen forward 1 . 



1 That neither the rock which had parted from the cliff, nor any frag- 

 ments of it, remained upon the surface below the naked face of the es- 

 carpment, is indeed sufficient evidence of its having passed beneath the 

 soil. But to account for its subsidence, it is by no means necessary to 

 assume, as appears to be conjectured in the text, the existence of a gulf 

 below it, into which it had been absorbed. The geological relations of the 

 strata point to a much easier, as well as a more correct, explanation of the 

 occurrence. Here, as elsewhere throughout the district, the malm rock 

 or freestone of the upper green sand formation rests upon the gault or 

 blue clay : a rock upon a yielding base. An adequate weight, placed 

 upon so unfirm a soil as the lower of these formations, must of necessity 



