on the east Coast of England. 153 
scribed grew in a level high enough to permit its vegetation ; 
and that the force (whatever it was) which destroyed it, low- 
ered the level of the ground where it stood. 
There is a force of subsidence (particularly in soft ground) 
which, being a natural consequence of gravity, slowly though 
perpetually operating, has its action sometimes quickened and 
rendered sudden by extraneous causes, for instance, by earth- 
quakes. The slow effects of this force of subsidence have 
been accurately remarked in many places ; examples also of its 
sudden action are recorded in almost every history of great 
earthquakes. The shores of Alexandria, according to Dolo- 
mieu’s observations, are a foot lower than they were in the 
time of the Ptolemies. Donati, in his natural history of the 
Adriatic, has remarked, seemingly with great accuracy, the ef- 
fects of this subsidence at Venice ; at Pola, in Istria ; at Lissa, 
Bua, Zara, and Diclo, on the coast of Dalmatia. I11 England, 
Borlase has given, in the Philosophical Transactions,* a cu- 
rious observation of a subsidence, of at least sixteen feet, in the 
ground between Sampson and Trescaw islands, in Scilly. The 
soft and low ground between the towns of Thorne and Gowle, 
in Yorkshire, a space of many miles, has so much subsided 
in latter times, that some old men of Thorne affirmed, “ that 
“ whereas they could before see little of the steeple, (of Gowle,) 
“ they now see the churchyard wall.”*f The instances of simi- 
lar subsidence which might be mentioned, are innumerable. 
This force of subsidence, suddenly acting by means of some 
earthquake, seems to me the most probable cause to which 
the actual submarine situation of the forest we are speaking 
* Vol. XL VIII. p. 62. 
+ Gough’s edition of Cam den’s Britannia, T. III. p. 35. 
MDCCXCIX. X 
