Page:Submerged forests (1913).djvu/115

VII] readied the Mount till long after the Roman period, and the legend is probably quite accurate. The Mount was surrounded by a wide marshy flat covered with alders and willows till well within the historic period; the contradictory story, that the Phoenician traded to St Michael's Mount for tin seems to be the invention of a sixteenth-century antiquary.

In Mount's Bay there has been subsidence as well as loss of land through the attacks of the sea, for beneath the alluvial plain, part of which is still seen in Marazion Marsh, is buried a submerged forest. Stumps of large oaks, as well as roots of hazel and sallow, are to be seen at various points on the foreshore, where the overlying alluvium and peat have been cleared away by the sea. But the oak-stumps seem to be rooted on a soil resting directly on solid rock; they do not appear to be underlain by estuarine deposits, or by lower submerged forests. This particular land-surface may therefore represent a long period of gradual sinking, during which the trees flourished continuously, and first at a considerable elevation above the sea.

The deposit would repay closer examination, for it was not well exposed while I was staying in Cornwall. I could find no trace of man in it at Penzance, and the contained flora was principally noticeable for its poverty and the entire absence of any of the characteristic west-country plants. The trees were