344 NATURAL HISTORY 



people, in the evening, which was very dark and tem- 

 pestuous, observed that the brick floors of their kitchens 

 began to heave and part ; and that the walls seemed to 

 open, and the roofs to crack : but they all agree that no 

 tremor of the ground, indicating an earthquake, was 

 ever felt ; only that the wind continued to make a most 

 tremendous roaring in the woods and hangers. The 

 miserable inhabitants, not daring to go to bed, remained 

 in the utmost solicitude and confusion, expecting every 

 moment to be buried under the ruins of their shattered 



mineral water of the Sand-rock spring. And yet more recently, and still 

 on the same coast, another slip, and of similar character, has occurred 

 between Luccomb and Bonchurch. Of the two latter events the parti- 

 culars have been well described : but the length of the present note 

 admonishes me to refrain from entering upon them. 



Yet one remark respecting them must be made ; the reference to them, 

 as to analogous cases, might otherwise induce the belief that they were, 

 in all particulars, similar to the Hawkley Slip. They are analogous, for 

 the strata concerned in them are the same ; and the parting from the face 

 of the rock of a portion of its escarpment, and the displacement of the 

 soft inferior clay, belong equally to both. But in one respect, and it is 

 an important one as connected with the present appearance of the several 

 slips, they differ materially : in the Hawkley Slip at no time were there 

 any debris visible on the surface ; that which was pasture is still pas- 

 ture, covered with a smooth and beautiful sward : in the slips of the Isle 

 of Wight, the surface is irregular in the extreme, covered with masses of 

 stones of all imaginable sizes and forms, scattered and heaped together 

 in the greatest confusion, and forming an intricate and highly broken 

 surface ; in the remote slip of the Undercliff especially there occur single 

 blocks of stone of immense size, each bulky enough to shelter cottages, 

 and in one instance, at St. Lawrence, an isolated block is seen of suffi- 

 cient size to support the parish church, diminutive indeed, but still the 

 parish church, which is erected on it. But if we reflect that, in the one 

 case, there is an expanse of gault of sufficient extent to admit of its being 

 moved, not for half a mile only, but to almost any conceivable distance, 

 (for the subsidence of the entire mass of the terrace would probably merely 

 cause the sliding of the gault upon the adjoining sandy strata of Woliner 

 Forest,) we shall not be surprised at its swallowing so much of the rock 

 as was, in the Hawkley Slip, immersed in it. Whereas, on the southern 

 coast of the Isle of Wight, the greater part of the small portion of gault 

 intercepted in the cliff would, on such an occurrence, be at once squeezed 

 out into the sea and be washed away, and the freestone of the slip would 

 be received on the under sand of that iron-bound shore ; retaining, how- 

 ever, among its gigantic fragments, some portions of the blue clay, dis- 

 persed in patches which, by their fertility, in the midst of the rocky 

 masses, give so lovely and peculiar a character to the Undercliff. 

 E. T. B. 



