342 NATURAL HISTORY 



About a hundred yards from the foot of this hanging 

 coppice stood a cottage by the side of a lane ; and two 

 hundred yards lower, on the other side of the lane, was 



sink into it. So prodigious a mass as that, which, on the occasion de- 

 scribed in the text, was separated from its adhesion to its native rock, 

 and left to be supported by the soft clay alone, was more than its pulpy 

 nature could support, and it gave way accordingly ; receiving into its 

 yielding substance, and burying almost entirely beneath its surface, the 

 detached face of the dill', which subsided into it so easily and so perpen- 

 dicularly as not to disturb the adjustment of a gate upon the sunken 

 mass, once on the top, and now at the foot of the escarpment. 



But the reception into the clay of so immense a bulk necessarily dis- 

 placed a portion of it equal in quantity to that of the mass which had been 

 received into it. Reduced by a long continued series of rains to a mor- 

 tar-like consistence, it gave way with the utmost freedom to the pressure. 

 That which was in the first instance displaced, drove forwards the por- 

 tion immediately in advance of it, and, the force being applied from below 

 as well as from behind, the subjacent pastures were torn into wavy clefts 

 and ridges. 



The hillocks in the first pasture below the Hanger, rounded in their 

 outline like the knolls occasionally met with in the London Clay (such 

 for instance, as that at Child's Hill, near Hampstead), may possibly indi- 

 cate that a similar slip to that of 1774, but probably in greater mass, had 

 previously occurred in the same situation. Eminences so marked as 

 these are not usual in the gault immediately beneath the malm rock 

 escarpments : generally its surface either at once assumes the level cha- 

 racter which belongs to it generally, or slopes gradually into the flat bot- 

 tom formed entirely by it, and from which its junction with the freestone 

 is never far distant. But here there are two well pronounced knolls, 

 and in the pasture beyond them there is still a tendency in the surface to 

 the same form, though the hillocks are there less marked. I cannot but 

 suspect that beneath these hillocks are buried masses of the freestone 

 derived from a former slip, which has forced the clay into so unusual a 

 form : and this is the more probable, as the rounded mass near Worldham, 

 known by the name of King John's Hill, is actually so constituted. 



An additional inducement to the belief that they owe their existence to 

 such a cause, is the occurrence behind the first of them, between the hil- 

 lock and the foot of the Hanger, of a pond, antecedent, like the knolls 

 themselves, to the slip of 1774. I do not recollect an instance in which 

 a pond is met with in the gault ; and certainly not in so comparatively 

 high a situation, yet almost immediately adjoining to much lower grounds. 

 It is scarcely to be conceived that a substance of so slight cohesion should 

 allow of the formation in it of a cup-like cavity, in which water could be 

 retained ; unless on a dead level, in a spot where the drainage was re- 

 ceived in greater quantity than could be readily discharged, and where 

 the water might consequently rest. But here the water would soak stea- 

 dily through some portion of the base of the adjoining hillock, were that 

 hillock composed of the gault alone, and, sapping the soft material, would 



