Page:Philosophical Transactions - Volume 003.djvu/99

, and to encrease Hypochondriacal diseases, and so cook'd now, as if it were to be transform'd into a Caudle or Custard.

IR, I beg your pardon, that I have not made an earlier return to the Letter, by giving you the account, you required of those prodigious Sands, which I have the unhappiness to be almost buried in, and by which a considerable part of my small fortune is quite swallow'd up. But I assure you, my silence was not the result of any neglect, but rather of my respects to you, whose employments I know are too great to suffer you often, vacare nugis. The truth is, I suspended the giving you any trouble, till I was put into some capacity of answering the whole Letter, as well concerning those few Improvements, this part of the Nation has made in Agriculture, as these wonderful Sands, which although they inhabit with and upon me, and have not yet exceeded one Century, since they first broke prison, I could not without some difficulty trace to their Original. But I now find it to be in a Warren in Lakenheath (a Town belonging to the Dean and Chapter of Ely, distant not above 5 miles, and lying South-west and by West of this place) where some great Sand-hills (whereof there is still a remainder) having the Superficies, or sword of the ground (as we call it) broken by the impetuous South-west winds, blew upon some of the adjacent grounds; which being much of the same nature, and having nothing but a thin crust of barren earth to secure its good behaviour, was soon rotted, and dissolved by the other Sand, and thereby easily fitted to increase the Mass, and to bear it company in this strange progress.

At the first Eruption thereof (which does not much exceed the memories of some persons still living) I suppose, the whole Magazin of Sand could not cover above 8. or 10 acres of ground, which increas'd into a 1000 acres, before the Sand had Rh