174 Scientific Proceedings, Royal Dublin Society. 
from the observations of persons who knew it thoroughly, and 
this at a time when no British ship appears to have sailed these 
western seas, though Dutch and French sailors must have made 
it a daily thoroughfare for their commerce. 
Let me call attention to another curious matter. Rockall is 
represented in this map as consisting of two adjacent islands—a 
larger and smaller one. Well, in the cruise of H.M.S. Porcupine 
two similar banks are represented, one of large size, as occupying 
the place where now only one comparatively small rock remains 
above the waters. 
In Surgeon Alex. Fisher’s History of the Voyage of the Hecla 
and Griper in 1821, we have a description of Rockall and of a 
search made, of course unsuccessfully, for another phantom land, 
“The Sunken Land of Busse.” ‘“ Monday, 24th—We had a distant 
view of that remarkable insulated rock, called Rockall. It looked 
at the distance we were from it (between four and five leagues) 
exactly like a ship under sail; it was reported indeed by the 
person who first saw it to be a strange vessel. If we estimated 
our distance from it at all correctly, its situation, as determined 
by H. M. Ship, Endymion, is very accurately laid down (lat. 
57° 39’ 30” N., and long. 13° 13’ W.) In the course of the afternoon, 
when at least forty miles from this rock, we found soundings in 
150 fathoms water, so that it may be regarded as the summit 
of a very extensive submarine mountain, whose sides, at least the 
western one, declined very gradually. Thursday, 27th—Tried 
for soundings on the supposed sunken land of Busse, according to 
its situation by Lieutenant Pickersgill, who, in his passage to 
Davis’ Strait, in 1776, struek soundings with a line of 320 fathoms 
in this very place, 57° N., 24° 24’ W.; but with 1,220 fathoms 
of line out we found no bottom.” 
In the year 1576 this land of “Busse” is described as having 
been met by one of Frobisher’s ships. It was a long island 
covered with wood, in lat. 57° 30’, along which they sailed for three 
days. So far as I can discover this “Busse” was the ship Zm- 
manuel of Bridgewater; but it is needless to follow the subject 
further. 
At numerous places round our Irish coasts, in particular along 
the south and west, there occur submerged bogs bordering along 
the coast-line, which form a conspicuous feature of our geologic 
