The real Parson and Clerk were in the sea off Holecombe headland, half way from Dawlish to Teignmouth. They were big rocks, more or less of human shape; and the rock nearer to the headland was a good deal taller than the other rock further out. There was some point in calling them the Parson and the Clerk, as the Clerk’s place in churches was in front of the Parson and somewhat lower down; but there is no point in giving the name to these imposters, as they are of equal size and side by side like Siamese Twins. I remember the old Parson very well indeed, and sometimes feel the loss of him as if he were a personal friend. I fear that the old Clerk is doomed. He has lost his head, and now looks more like a mummied cat, as one sees him from the train. These rocks are ‘new’ red sandstone, and there are others on the coast with grotesque forms of human figures and heads; and such forms may be seen in granite rocks at no great distance from the coast. The best is Bowerman’s Nose, four miles from here and fourteen from the Parson and the Clerk. (I take ‘nose’ to be the same as ‘naze’ or ‘ness,’ as in Hope’s Nose at the entrance to Torbay.) In _Dartmoor_, a poem, Carrington calls Bowerman’s Nose “a granite God, | to whom, in days long flown, the suppliant knee | in trembling homage bow’d.” He there assumes that it was in its present shape when there were tribes here who would worship it; but the shape is due to weathering. In the Dartmoor granite there are fissures which are widened out by frost and wet until large blocks become detached and fall away. And this god was created by the fall of the surrounding granite from four upright fissures. These enclosed a mass a dozen feet thick and forty high; and there are other fissures running across this and giving it somewhat the appearance of a man. I once took the trouble to go up to Mount Sipylos in Asia Minor to see the figure of Niobê, 20 April 1882. Homer speaks of it (_Iliad_, XXIV. 617) as Niobê herself, turned into stone, and still brooding on the wrongs the gods had done her. But the figure has been worn down by weather to an almost shapeless mass, and it is not big enough to be impressive. Pausanias went there 1700 years before me, and I can say no more for it than he says, I. 21. 3: at a distance you might take it for a human figure, but you must not come too close. After going to see Niobê, I felt there might be something in what Philo of Byzantium says at the beginning of his book about the Seven Wonders of the World--instead of taking troublesome journeys, people had much better stay at home and read his book. However, I have been to see the remains of two of the Seven, the Pyramids at Memphis and the Temple of Diana at Ephesos, and the sites on which two others stood, the Zeus at Olympia and the Colossos at Rhodes, and the site also of another, the Pharos at Alexandria, if that is to be reckoned in the Seven.