THE SCILLY ISLANDS Sulpicius Severus uses the form Sy/inatuis, a word which Professor Rhys associates with the Silulanus of the inscribed stone at Lydney, in a Silurian district. The exact words of Sulpicius are these : />/ SyHiiancim insulam, qua ultra Bri- tannias sita est; he is speaking of the banishment of two foreign bishops to these isles, convicted of heresy. Solinus called the islands Silura; Richard of Cirencester wrote of them as Sy,^- (iUles, " also denominated the CEstromenides and Cassiterides" ; other writers identified them with the Greek Hesperides. The Danes named them Syllingar, and a writer of the sixteenth century spoke of them as the " Isle of Sorlingues ". From all these names we can only draw con- jectural conclusions. The whole matter has been further confused by vague traditions of the buried land of Lyonesse ; but if the ocean really swallowed a large tract of land here, it must have been long before the reach of written record. Geology can tell us that. Popular rumours of this nature are tremendously long- lived, and often have a substratum of truth ; the mistake of too credulous historians has been to bring the calamity down to far too recent a date. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a mention of a great and destructive tide, on iith November, 1099; and some have tried to make us believe that this tide washed away the 27 miles of country lying between the islands and Land's End. It is probable that the islands are now more numerous than they were once. Strabo speaks of them as having been only ten ; 271
