THE INSULATION OF ST. MICHAEL'S MOUNT. 15 
ment, for he says that the portion of it which he examined was 
300 yards below full tide mark, and at high water its upper sur- 
face had 12 feet of water on it.* 
For the most minute description of it, however, we are in- 
debted to Dr. Boase, who carefully studied it in the winter of 
1825. From his account we learn that the trees were of hazel, 
alder, elm, and oak; that about a foot below the surface of the 
bed, the mass was chiefly composed of leaves and hazel nuts in a 
good state of preservation, the nuts, however, having lost their 
kernels; that in the bed were found fragments of insects, espe- 
cially the elytra of beetles displaying the most beautiful colours ; 
that the fishermen asserted that at low water the forest was trace- 
able all the way to Newlyn pier, west of Penzance; that he was 
of opinion, from the material brought up by ships’ anchors, that 
it extended sea-ward to, at least, Gwavas lake, the well-known 
roadstead ; and that, having observed similar vegetable remains 
east up among the pebbles at Lamorna Cove, four miles, in a 
straight line, S.S.W. from Penzance, he thought it very probable 
that a wood once covered the whole of the valley which now forms 
Mount’s Bay.t In short, if Dr. Boase’s opinion is even but par- 
tially correct—and we shall presently see that it is fully borne out 
by corresponding facts elsewhere—the Mount, during the forest 
era, must have been a “hoar rock in a wood;” and it may be 
repeated that it is possible that the tradition so frequently men- 
tioned was primarily based on the only philosophical interpreta- 
tion of which the submerged forest was capable. 
We have seen, however, that Prof. Max Miller demurs to this 
argument ; objecting that he has not been able to discover any 
proof of the presence of vegetable remains between the Mount 
and the mainland,{ and that it is, to say the least, curious that, 
even in the absence of such stringent evidence, geologists should 
feel so confident that the Mount once stood on the mainland.§ 
The only aspect of the question in which this objection ap- 
pears to me to have any force whatever, is that of supposing that 
the subsidence, unquestionably proved by the submergence of the 
* Natural History of Cornwall, pp. 221-3. 
+ See Trans. Roy. Geol. Soc. of Cornwall, vol. iii, p. 166, &c. 
t p. 334. 
g p. 335. 
HS 
