23S 
THE NATURAL HISTORY 
[LETT" 
from any other cause. A strange event, that happened not 
long since, justifies our suspicions ; which, though it befell not 
within the limits of this parish, yet, as it was within the hundred 
of Selborne, and as the circumstances were singular, may fairly 
claim a place in this work. 
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 hanger 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 appears 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 posi- 
tion 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 unincumbered; but would have been buried in 
heaps of rubbish had the fragment parted and fallen forward. 
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 farm-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 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 
