222 NATURAL HISTORY 
Bay, midway betwixt the piers of St. Michael’s Mount and Pen- 
zance, on the ioth of January 1757, the remains of the wood 
which, according to tradition, covered anciently a large trad of 
ground on the edge of Mount’s Bay, appeared. The hands had 
been drawn off from the fhore by a violent fea, and had left fe- 
veral places, twenty yards long and ten wide, wafhed bare, ftrewed 
with Bones like a broken caufeway, and wrought into hollows 
fomewhat below the reft of the fands : this gave me an opportunity 
of examining the following parts of the ancient trees : In the firft: 
pool, part of the trunk appeared, and the whole courfe of the 
roots, eighteen feet long and twelve wide, was difplayed in a horizon- 
tal pofttion ; upon fpading round, we found the fand to be a thin 
layer only of ten inches deep, and then the natural earth appeared, 
in which the roots remained fo firmly fixed, that, with a pick and 
crow of iron, we could not get off one piece, but were content to 
faw off what we could come at. The trunk at the fracture was 
ragged, and by the level range of the roots which lay round it, was 
part of the body of the tree juft above its divifion into roots. Of 
what kind it was, there did not enough remain above the roots 
pofitively to determine : the roots were pierced plentifully by the 
teredo , or auger-worm. Thirty feet to the weft, we found the re- 
mains of another tree ; the ramifications extended ten feet by fix ; 
there was no ftock in the middle ; it was therefore part of the 
under or bottom roots of the tree, pierced alfo by the teredo , and 
of the fame texture as the firft. Fifty feet to the north of the firft 
tree, we found part of a large oak : it was the body of a tree three 
feet in diameter ; its top reclined to the eaft. In this much more 
folid wood, the teredo had made no lodgements ; we traced the 
body of this tree, as it lay fhelving, the length of feven feet, but 
to what farther depth the body reached we could not difcern, be- 
caufe of the immediate influx of water, as foon as we had made 
a pit for difcovery. The earth reached within fix inches of the 
furface of the fands ; but fo firmly rooted was the tree, that no 
fledge could move it : not fo fixed was the ftock of a willow-tree, 
with the bark on, one foot and a half diameter, within two paces 
of the oak, where, upon endeavouring to cleave oft a part of the 
willow, the earth fhook fo much under the people at work, that 
they were "in fome doubt whether they had beft to proceed : the 
timber of the willow was changed into a ruddy colour by lying fo 
long in fait water. Hard by, we found part of a hazel-branch 
with its fat glofty bark on. The earth in all the tried places ap- 
pears to be a black, cold, marfh earth, covered only with a thin 
layer of fand, but very little intermixed. In it we found fragments 
of the leaves of the Juncus aquations max wins ; and had any flowers 
appeared, 
