The inevitable result of such collapsing during successive
centuries, will have been the slow subsidence of the floor and of
the walls, and their burial beneath the accumulated worm-castings.
The subsidence of a floor, whilst it still remains nearly
horizontal, may at first appear improbable; but the case presents
no more real difficulty than that of loose objects strewed on the
surface of a field, which, as we have seen, become buried several
inches beneath the surface in the course of a few years, though
still forming a horizontal layer parallel to the surface. The
burial of the paved and level path on my lawn, which took place
under my own observation, is an analogous case. Even those parts
of the concrete floor which the worms could not penetrate would
almost certainly have been undermined, and would have sunk, like
the great stones at Leith Hill Place and Stonehenge, for the soil
would have been damp beneath them. But the rate of sinking of the
different parts would not have been quite equal, and the floor was
not quite level. The foundations of the boundary walls lie, as
shown in the section, at a very small depth beneath the surface;
they would therefore have tended to subside at nearly the same rate
as the floor. But this would not have occurred if the foundations
had been deep, as in the case of some other Roman ruins presently
to be described.
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