So the idea of marking the Wolf was, for a while, abandoned; but the progress in the science of lighthouse construction made during the early years of this century, and Robert Stevenson’s successful erection on the Bell Rock, suggested that perhaps, after all, a lighthouse might be built on the Wolf. Stevenson was asked to consider the matter, and after doing so he undertook to put one there at a cost of £150,000. Why his offer was not accepted we do not know; possibly the figure was too high. At all events, instead of a lighthouse, a beacon—first of oak and then of wrought iron—was the only indication of this treacherous rock till the year 1860, when the Trinity House, unwilling that the dangers of the Wolf should only be indicated by day, set about erecting the lighthouse that now stands there, and which rises to the height of 110 feet. [Illustration: WOLF ROCK LIGHTHOUSE.] It took nine years to finish, and certainly the task of building it did not prove _less_ difficult than was anticipated. Every variety of engineering trouble presented itself, but only to be overcome by those entrusted with the work. The ordinary reader could not grasp all these, even were they set out before him; but he can at least realize that, as but two feet of the Wolf Rock are dry, even at dead low water, the lighthouse builders can, at the commencement of their operations, have had but a remarkably short time each day available for work. Earlier by far than any idea of placing a lighthouse on the isolated Wolf, was that for building one at the Land’s End. This place was talked of as a western harbour for England in 1702, and an estimate for making one there, at the cost of £30,000, included the expenses of erecting a lighthouse. But nothing came of this harbour scheme, and three years later, high and low lighthouses were proposed at Porthdenack Point and on one of the headlands—probably that on the north—of Whitsand Bay. These also were never actually commenced. Perhaps it was felt that, whilst the Carn Bras—a mile to the west of the Land’s End—and the group of rocks around it remained unmarked, to build lighthouses at the Land’s End would not have been of much service. And who, in those opening years of the eighteenth century, would have suggested a lighthouse on the Carn Bras? True, Winstanley had placed such a building on the Eddystone; but the storm had soon blown it bodily into the sea, and the stability of the second lighthouse there was still untried. So the dangers of the western extremity of Old England were left to do their worst for home-coming ships for nearly a hundred years more; then the Carn Bras was marked by the now famous ‘Longships’ lighthouse.