262 NATURAL IlISTOBT 
unencumbered, but would bave been buried in heaps of 
rubbisb, 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 3 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 
* In a note to this passaire Mr. Bennett expresses tbe opinion that it 
is not necessary to assume the existence of a gulf into which the mass 
was absorbed. The geological relations of tlie 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 sinlc 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 escarpinent. 
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. 
