Fol. 56. “Most of the inhabitants can [speak] no word of Cornish, but _very few_ are ignorant of the English; and yet _some so affect their owne_, as to _a stranger they will not speake it_: for, if meeting them by chance, you inquire the way or any such matter, your answer shal be, _Meea navidua cowzasawsneck_, I can speake no Saxonage.” W.] THE ISLANDS OF SCILLY. THE EDITOR. Neither Mr. Hals nor Mr. Tonkin has noticed these islands. It may be proper, therefore, to add a few observations on their ancient history, of which however very little is known. That the Phœnicians, and after them the merchants of Carthage, traded with the Britons for tin, is established without the slightest doubt; but no possible absurdity can be greater than the supposition that voyagers, having sailed through the Mediterranean Sea, and passed between the Pillars of Hercules into the exterior ocean, and navigated through this boundless and dreaded expanse of water for about a thousand miles, should then stop short at trifling islands, or rather rocks, and that too year after year during centuries, with the country before them, actually in sight, from whence the valuable commodity which they sought must have been manifestly taken, and where they would have been sure of an improved market for the commercial articles to be given in exchange. Yet, relying on the literal interpretation of passages from ancient authors, who never visited the land of tin, nor possibly ever conversed with the adventurous sailors who had been there, persons of account have gravely asserted that the rocks of Scilly were the ancient Cassiterides; while others, to render this strange supposition somewhat less absurd, have glossed it with the miracle, probably invented by Florence of Worcester, of a large tract of country between these existing islands and the Land’s End, having been engulphed within times of recent memory. Perhaps this mode of induction, directly opposed to common sense and to experience, may be a remnant of the hallucination which bound itself round men’s minds at the period when the stores of ancient learning were first poured on modern Europe; under this delusion they were not contented with ascribing a high degree of merit to the artists, to the writers, to the architects of Greece and Rome; nothing short of absolute perfection was believed to exist in each, and this servile appeal to authority is not even yet quite obsolete, although the time for such delusions being in the slightest degree advantageous either to literature or to science, has long since passed by. The traders who frequented these remote shores would naturally mistake land in the great unbounded ocean for mere islands, and their vague descriptions, purposely made obscure, proved so successful that Julius Cæsar was not aware when he landed on the coast of Kent that he was arrived in the country producing tin.