Page:The Cornwall coast.djvu/74

68 THE CORNWALL COAST with some china-clay, from its excellent small harbour. Pentewan stone has a good name for hardness and durability ; its qualities are well shown in the tower of St. Austell Church. In the tin works here, carried on at some depth below sea-level, were found horns of the Irish elk, not petrified, but completely metallised by the tin ore ; also definite traces of buried forest. It is said also that some curious oaken canoes were discovered in the soil, but were, unfortu- nately, destroyed for firewood by the tinners. It is hard to estimate how many valuable antiquities have been similarly destroyed by carelessness and ignorance ; but such ruin has been more often suffered by stone monuments, longstones, kistvaens, snatched for use as gate-posts and walls by heed- less farmers and builders. About two miles inland from Pentewan is Heli- gan, a very fine estate, whose gardens display rare subtropical vegetation. Such vegetation is rather a boasted feature in southern and western Cornwall, and is, of course, interesting as a kind of tour-de- force, showing what the British climate at its best can do. Apart from this use, however, it may seem to some of us that such efforts are easily overdone ; the native beauty of an English garden or woodland has infinitely more appeal, more freshness, more loveliness, than any grandeurs of the exotic. The glories of Kew Gardens have their charm, their utility, their educational value ; but tropical growths are really as much out of place in an English landscape as a Moorish palace or a Buddhist temple would be. All who know any- thing of landscape gardening know that it has been a fertile field for the growth and exemplifica- tion of false taste. Yet the plea of botanical