To Sir Henry Ellis, K.H. F.R.S. Sec. S.A. for the communication of his MS. additions to Tanner’s Notitia Monastica for Cornwall.
To the Rev. Josiah Forshall, M.A. F.R.S. late Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and now Keeper of the Manuscripts in the British Museum, for his extracts from a very ancient Manuscript relative to the See of Bodmin.
I have to acknowledge, with my best thanks, the assistance of Thomas Hingston, Esq. M.D. afforded by his arrangement of Extracts relating to Cornwall, from the Itinerary of William of Worcester; and by an original communication on the Etymology of Names of Places within the county.[1]
The only existing Manuscript of Mr. Tonkin’s Work having remained for some years in the possession of Mr. Whitaker, he added to it various
notes and ilustrations, frequently interlined, or blended with the original writing, so as to render the task difficult, in many cases, to distinguish the one from the other. In almost every passage of any length, Mr. Whitaker’s additions are marked with a [W.]
Geology having pressed forward during the present century, at a pace unexampled in other sciences, may reasonably be expected to reach new discoveries in comparatively short intervals of time; these have been reduced, however, almost to instants in respect to Cornwall. After the very able, minute, and laborious investigation made by Doctor Boase, of every district, of every parish in the whole county, the work of discovery would seem to have been completed, at the least for several years; but Mr. de la Beche came soon afterwards into Cornwall, under the sanction of Government, assisted by officers of the Engineers employed on the great Trigonometrical Survey; and this eminent Geologist has, in consequence, been enabled to lay down the various main lodes, the cross courses, the elvans, &c. together with the junctions of granite, greenstone, and killas, with an accuracy and discrimination never before attained, nor ever approximated to, except by Mr. Richard Thomas, in his survey of the mining district, made about twenty years ago.
Mr. De la Beche has also been enabled to deduce several general laws observed in the direction of cleavages, in the dip of strata, in the heaves and slides of lodes, all of which will be detailed in an eagerly expected volume, together with a discovery
most unexpected. The saxa metallifera of Cornwall had always been supposed referable to a very remote period of geological epochs, far anterior to the age of organic remains; till this opinion became shaken by the discovery of shells, or of their impressions, in the hard schist rocks near Tintagell: others were subsequently found more to the south and west; till at last Mr. De la Beche has detected the remains of organized life adjacent to a productive Copper Lode.
Two other eminent geologists, whom it would be equally idle and presumptuous for me to praise, have established the fact of a formation in the northern parts of Cornwall and Devon, not less unexpected than the discovery just noticed.
Professor Sedgwick and Mr. Murchison having investigated the deep-seated rocks in Wales, and in the adjacent districts, have finally traced the carboniferous series under the Severn, and so far west as the level ridge of land, extending from near Launceston to the sea coast between St. Gennys and Botreaux Castle, along which plane the escarpment manifests itself in a very conspicuous manner.