The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

THE COKNISH PENINSULA. 83
But thoxigli the miners of Cornwall be ever so persevering, and take advan-
tage of every improvement in machinery, the cost of coal and timber will not
enable them to compete with other mining countries whose ores are richer. The
Stannary Parliament, which used to discuss the business connected with the mines,
meets no longer. Its last meetings took place in Devonshire in 1749, in Cornwall
in 1752. Many of the miners have sought new homes beyond the Atlantic,
and in proportion as the wealth of the mines diminishes, the country popula-
tion decreases in numbers, and the towns grow larger. Quarries and china-clay
diggings, though of importance, are not sufficiently so to compensate for the mines
that had to be abandoned.* There remain, however, many sources of wealth,
including pilchard and mackerel fisheries ; market gardens, from which London
draws a large supply of early vegetables ;
and productive fields, fertilised by the
calcareous sand which is spread over them. The rocks of Cornwall are poor in
carbonate of lime, resembling in this respect the rocks of Brittany, but there is an
abundance of marine organisms, by which the lime contained in the water of the
ocean is secreted, and the sand along the shore converted into a valuable fertiliser.
For centuries this sand has been utilised to increase the productiveness of the soil.
It is more especially made use of in the vicinity of the little bay of Padstow,
where about 100,000 tons of it are annually spread over the fields, this being about
one-fifth of the total quantity applied in this manner throughout Cornwall and
Devonshire.!
The inhabitants of the Cornish peninsula offered a long-continued resistance to
the Saxon invaders, and in many localities they still present peculiar features.
Black hair, sallow complexions, short and broad skulls, are met with more
frequently than in other parts of England. Manj' of the women on the south
coast, between Falmouth and Lizard Point, are of a southern type, which it has
been sought to trace to an immigration from Spain, and indeed Tacitus writes of
Iberians who settled in the country. A few vestiges of a division into hostile clans
survive to the present day. The old language, however, a sister tongue of that
of Wales, lives now only in the geographical nomenclature. For two centuries it
had ceased to be commonly spoken, and the last woman able to express herself in
the original language of the country died in 1778 at Mousehole, near Penzance.
Enthusiastic philologists have raised a stone to her memory. A few words
of Cornish have been preserved in the local dialect. Cornish literature, which has
been especially studied by Mr. Whitley Stokes, is, he says, limited to a glossary of
the twelfth century, and a number of "mysteries" of later date, for the most part
adapted or translated from the contemporaneous literature current during the
Middle Ages. A society has been formed in Cornwall for the purpose of publish-
ing the ancient manuscripts. The numerous popular legends, which still form
the stock of many a simple story-teller in the remote villages of Cornwall, have
been collected and published in various English works.
* In 1844 the mines yielded 152,970 tons of copper ore ; at present they )-ield scarcely 50,000 tons.
Of china clay, or kaolin, about 150,000 tons are annually exported.
t Delesse, " Lithologie du fond des mers." ,