HOOK FORMATION
93
of the beach in its original direction—the new growing point being grafted, as it were, on to the base of the last-formed hook. When several hooks have been formed all but the last one are washed by relatively tranquil waters, and are not subject to buffeting by waves of any magnitude. Their shingle is thus no longer kept on the move and becomes dormant. One striking consequence is a marked change in the vegetation. Plants not found on mobile shingle make their appearance, whilst several of the original colonists disappear, the settlement of which dated back to the period when the hook was in contact
Fig. ai.—Shingle Spit with Hooks, illustrated by the Hurst Castle Bank
with the open sea. A most striking example of this apparition of new plants on hooks is to be seen on the Hurst Castle Bank, where Golden Samphire {Inula crithmoides) forms dense continuous zones on the shore lines of the hooks—than which, when flowering in August, no more vivid spectacle in the botanical world can be imagined. Another plant, peculiar to dormant shingle, is the East Anglian Statice binervosa.
   Occasionally hooklike embankments of shingle are produced, not in the regular apical growth of the system, but as local overthrows at some point of weakness or insufficient height in the line of the main beach. Such an one occurs on the beach at Shoreham, a furlong to the east of the present outfall of the River Adur. When mingled with true hooks such overthrows or pseudo-hooks are difficult to distinguish from low and wasted