t must be supposed to have become an island.

In all these discussions it is taken for granted that St. Michael's Mount
was at one time unquestionably a "hoar rock in the wood," and that the
land between the Mount and the mainland was once covered by a forest which
extended along the whole of the seaboard. That there are submerged forests
along that seaboard is attested by sufficient geological evidence; but I
have not been able to discover any proof of the unbroken continuity of
that shore-forest, still less of the presence of vegetable remains in the
exact locality which is of interest to us, namely between the Mount and
the mainland. It is true that Dr. Borlase discovered the remains of trunks
of trees on the 10th of January, 1757; but he tells us that these forest
trees were not found round the Mount, but midway betwixt the piers of St.
Michael's Mount and Penzance, that is to say, about one mile distant from
the Mount; also, that one of them was a willow-tree with the bark on it,
another a hazel-branch with the bark still fat and glossy. The place where
these trees were found was three hundred yards below full-sea mark, where
the water is twelve feet deep when the tide is in.

Carew, also, at an earlier date, speaks of roots of mighty trees found in
the sand about the Mount, but without giving the exact place. Lelant
(1533-40) knows of "Spere Heddes, Axis for Warre, and Swerdes of Copper
wrapped up in lynist, scant perishid," that had been found of late years
near the Mount, in St. Hilary's parish, in tin works; but he places the
land that had been devoured of the sea between Penzance and Mousehole,
_i.e._ more than two miles distant from the Mount.

The value of this kind of geological evidence must of course be determined
by geologists. It is quite possible that the remains of trunks of trees
may still be found on the very isthmus between the Mount and the mainland;
but 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, and that exactly the same persuasion should
have been shared by people long before the name of geology was known.
There is a powerful spell in popular traditions, against which even men of
science are not always proof, and is just possible that if the tradition
of the "hoar rock in the wood" had not existed, no attempts would have
been made to explain the causes that severed St. Micha