tures of remarkable elegance and beauty. All these demand more consideration than I can now stay to give them; so that I propose to return to them in detail presently, describing them to you, not from the hurried glances we can give them in the boat, but as they appear when at home in the Aquarium.
Mean while we put the boat before the wind, and run along the inhospitable coast on our left. We leave the pleasant vale behind, and skim swiftly by the black rocks of Ratcliff Head, and the distorted and confused strata of Goggin's Barrow. We pass Osmington Mills, where a rather ample sheet of water is poured in a foaming cascade over the low cliff, and where those curious circular blocks of grit-stone, flat on one side and conical on the other, are imbedded with regularity in the sandy face of the precipice; and leave on our quarter the rocks, where the abundance of iron pyrites and sulphur has more than once presented the strange phenomenon of spontaneous fire, a phenomenon distinctly remembered still by the inhabitants of Weymouth, who night after night used to gaze out with wonder on the Burning Cliffs.[1]
- ↑ In 1816, a large conical mass of earth began to slide from its base, and continued with intermissions to descend for three years, when it reached its present situation on the sea beach, an oval cone of 800 feet in length, and about 80 in height. After a few years, smoke and steam began to issue from several cracks and apertures, about half way up its sides, and in March, 1827, fire was seen to proceed from them, on several occasions. An attempt to bore near the heated part was made, which did not succeed, in consequence of the hardness of the rock. But in April, an excavation was commenced on the south side of the cliff about forty feet above the beach, the materials removed consisting of lime and alum stone, intermixed with dark bituminous earth, which was smoking at the time of removal. Stone and stone-coal were afterwards quarried out, which emitted sparks of fire suffi-
