:262 NATURAL HISTORY 



unencumbered, but would have been buried in heaps of 

 rubbish, had the fragment parted and fallen forward. 1 



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 a 

 /arm-house, in which lived a labourer and his family; and 

 just by, a stout new barn. The cottage was inhabited by 

 an old woman and her son, and his wife. These people, in 

 the evening, which was very dark and tempestuous, 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 agreed 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, ex- 

 pecting every moment to be buried under the ruins of their 

 shattered edifices. When daylight came they were at leisure 

 to contemplate the devastations of the night. They then 



1 In a note to this passage Mr. Bennett expresses the opinion that it 

 i? not necessary to assume the existence of a gulf into which the mass 

 was absorbed. The geological relations of the strata, he says, 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 greensand 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 sink into it. 

 So prodigious a mass as that which, on the occasion described 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 sub- 

 stance, and burying almost entirely beneath its surface the detached 

 face of the cliff, which subsided into it so easily and so perpendicularly 

 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. 



In other situations, and particularly on the southern coast of the Isle 

 of Wight, slips similar to that of Hawkley have taken place, and from 

 the same cause : either the separation of a portion of the freestone rock 

 of the upper greensand formation and its subsidence into the gault ; or 

 the loosening of the gault, and the subsequent separation and subsidence 

 of a portion of the freestone, which could no longer be supported when 

 its natural foundation had thus given way. ED. 



