6 THE INSULATION OF ST. MICHAEL'S MOUNT. 
After reading the paper just sketched, I devoted a considerable 
amount of attention to the literature of the question, as well as to 
the physical phenomena in Devon and Cornwall to which it was 
related ; and was enabled to state in the Royal Institution lecture, 
in 1867, that the tradition of the Mount having been five or six 
miles from the sea and enclosed in a very thick wood, was first 
mentioned, not, as I had been led to suppose from the writings of 
Dr. Boase and Dr. T. F. Barham, by Florence of Worcester, who 
died in A.D. 1118, and no where mentions the Mount, but by 
William of Worcester, who visited Cornwall about A.D. 1478, or 
360 years further from the period to which the tradition pointed, 
thus rendering the tradition itself of little or no value; that the 
alleged old Cornish name assumed so many forms, and there was 
so much uncertainty about its exact import, as to render it impro- 
bable that it had any value as evidence ; and that the submerged 
forest in Mount’s Bay was known much earlier than I had sup- 
posed, as it was mentioned by Leland (1533-40), who also spoke 
of the similar forest in Torbay. 
The printed abstract of this lecture, prepared by myself, closes 
with a Recapitulation containing the following passage :—“ Nine- 
teen centuries ago it” (the Mount) “possessed a safe harbour, so 
that its insulation must have been effected long before. It was at 
one time unquestionably ‘a hoar rock in a wood,’ but in all pro- 
bability it had ceased to be so long before any language now 
known to scholars was spoken in the district. Prior to its insula- 
tion was the era of the growth of the forests now submerged 
along our entire sea-bord,” &c. 
In the paper read at Barnstaple, in July, 1867, I was able to 
make the following further corrections :—that the British name of 
the Mount was neither first mentioned by Carew in 1602, as was 
commonly believed, nor did it in its earliest known form contain 
any reference or allusion to a wood, since Norden mentioned it, 
probably in 1584, and Camden certainly in 1586, both giving it 
as Careg Cowse, which the first translated Grey rock, and the second 
rupis cana ; that the name occurs in two different forms in Carew 
—Cara Couz in Clowze and Cara-Clowse in Cowse—each of which he 
translates in the same way—The hoary rock in the wood ;—and that, _ 
as there was no Pope Gregory in the year 1070, there must be 
some error in the following statement made by William of Wor- 
