Ob. XX.] 



ST. MIC1IAKI/S MOUNT, CORNWALL. 



543 



the 



Cornish tongue. 



Near 



conditions by encroachments of the sea on the land, and the 

 sweeping away of a low tract which once filled the bay, or 

 by a general subsidence of the whole region to a lower level, 

 ve should have to assign a date to the old forest anterior to 

 Phcenician times, and thus ascribe a fabulous antiquity to 



Here, no doubt, as elsewhere, the 

 waves have in the course of the last twenty or thirty cen- 

 turies converted some tracts of land into sea. 

 zance for example, in the same bay, it is recorded that 

 thirty-six acres of pasture land called the Green have been 

 Gradually removed and reduced to a bare sandy beach, since 

 the reign of Charles II. It is also known that the grand- 

 father of the present Yicar of Madron (1865) received tithe 

 for land which was situated under the cliff at Penzance. 

 Mr. Peno-elly also mentions that the coast near Marazion 



;. 53), which is only a third of a mile distant from the 

 Mount, has yielded slowly at some points within the memory 

 of persons now living, but so gradually that the rate of waste 

 cannot have exceeded ten feet per century ; and he calculates 

 that if this cause of change is alone appealed to, it would 

 have taken ten thousand years or more, before our time, to 

 remove so much land as would have stretched from the main- 

 land to the Mount. On the other hand, it is a somewhat 

 forced hypothesis to assume that whereas a retrospect of 



time 



nineteen centuries displays to us the Mount o 

 the same as it now is, yet shortly before that 

 Cornish was spoken, there was a sinking down and sub- 

 mergence of a wooded tract. 



There have certainly been depressions here, as in so many 

 other parts of the English coast, but they may have happened 



b 



time of history. Thus for example 



Michael's Mount 



V 



•X- 



mould 



hazel-nuts, and the branches, leaves, and trunks of forest 



elm 



The 



roots are seen in the soil in their natural position. The wing 



anion 



* 



Boase, cited by De la Bcche in his Eeport on the Geology of Devon, &c. 



chap. 



xm. 



