[cont.] "..."The flats, which stretched from one island to another, are plain evidences of a former union subsisting between many now distinct islands. The flats between Trescaw, Brêhar, and Sampson are quite dry at a spring-tide, and men easily pass dry-shod from one island to another over sand-banks (where, upon the shifting of the sands, walls and ruins are frequently discovered), upon which, at full sea, there are ten and twelve feet of water. From the southern side of St Martin there stretches out a large shoal towards Treacaw and St Mary's; and from St Mary's a flat, called Sandy-bar, shoots away to meet it; and between these two shoals there are but four feet of water in the channel called Chow Sound,--all strong arguments that those islands were once one continued tract of land, though now, as to their low lands, overrun with the sea and sand. 'The Isles Cassiterides' (says Strabo, Geo., lib. 5) 'are ten in number, close to one another. One of them is desert and unpeopled; the rest are inhabited.' But see how the sea has multiplied these islands; there are now one hundred and forty. Into so many fragments are they divided; and yet there are but six inhabited."--An Account of the Great Alteration which the Islands of Scylley have undergone, &c., by the Rev. Wm. Borlase, M.A., F.R.S., Phil. Trans., vol. xlviii. part i.
"The Cornish land, from Plymouth, discovers itself to be devoured more and more to the westward, according to the aforesaid tradition of the tract of the Lionesse, being encroached upon above half the present distance from the Land's End to Scilly; whence it is probable that the low isthmus once joining Scilly and the Lionesse was first encroached upon in the same manner. The projecting land being exposed to the concurrence of the tides from the Irish, the Bristol, and British Channels, by whose violence and impetuosity, increased by the winds, the loose earth of the Gulf-rock might be worn away, leaving the resistible substance behind, standing as it is in the middle way betwixt Scilly and Cornwall."--A Natural and Historical Account of the Islands of Scilly, by Robert Heath."
Hunt 1903
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