26 DESCRIPTION OF THE STRATA. 



be thy clayey timic, that has so long held togethei', under these daily 

 convulsions. Well may historians report, that part of thy shore has 

 been lost, and that some of thy towns have sunk in the ocean ; for it 

 is marvellous that such reiterated shocks have suffered even a frag- 

 ment of thee to exist. 



The author of this hypothesis might almost as well have accounted 

 for these phenomena, by adopting one of the fables of the ancients, 

 and applying it to this district. He might have alleged, that a mighty 

 giant, another Enceladus or Typhoeus, such an one as could set 

 Ossa upon Pelion, or Rosebury Topping upon Black Hambletorf, 

 lies buried alive under Holdemess and the Wolds, with the Wolds on 

 his head, and the Spurn on his feet (and spurn seems to have a natu- 

 ral connection with/ee^J; and that this son of Titan, whenever old 

 Ocean lashes his sides, begins to puff and blow, trembles in every 

 limb, sweats at every pore, and vomits forth, — not smoke, and flames, 

 and liquefied stones, like his brother who groans under the weight of 

 mpunt jEtna, — but streams of pure water ! 



But, to be serious. There is no good ground for supposing that 

 the clays of the Holderness coast form a continuous covering; much 

 less for imagining, that a stratum of gravel uniformly runs between 

 the clay and the chalk. In the cliffs near Whitby, we find the clays 

 in some places resting on the solid rock, while in others a bed of 

 gravel appears to intervene : and it is highly probable, that the same 

 irregularities prevail in Holderness. It is well known, that the scar- 

 city of water on the Wolds does not arise, as that writer fancies, from 

 their being coated with a stratum of clay impervious to water, with a 

 substratum of gravel which steals all the water from the sm-face ; for 

 no such stratum and substratum exist there, except on part of the 

 southern skirts of the Wolds, where there is little or no scarcity of 

 water ; but it results from the absorbent quality and niimerous fissures 

 of the chalk, which rises almost to the surface. Much of the rain 



