“Well, old man,” said a mate, “what be up wi’ you?” “I have a whim in my head,” he answered, “and I’m tryin’ to reduce he to practice.” Coster’s whim was much joked about, but when set up outside his head at the pit mouth, it proved to be no joke at all, but a real boon. Superincumbent earth is _burden_. A miner worked at Headland Warren mines, on the Webburn, and lived at Challacombe. Every day when leaving work he brought away with him a lump of ore in his pocket, and on reaching his lodging threw it away among the furze bushes. Years after the farmer at Challacombe removed three cartloads of these lumps; that was when tin was at £60 a ton. From a speech of Sir Walter Raleigh in Parliament in 1601, when Lord Warden of the Stannaries, it would appear that the pay of a working tinner was then four shillings per week, finding himself. Of this he boasts as a great change for the better, inasmuch as previously the tinner had received but half that amount. By all accounts the tinners were in a worse condition than the agricultural labourers. The Stannary Parliament for the tinners on Dartmoor sat on Crockern Tor till the court was removed to Truro. The first Parliament held there of which records remain was on September 11th, 1494; the last I have heard of was held at the close of last century. The Cornish tinners had their Stannary Court on Caradon. Already in Carew’s time mines had been driven into the bowels of the earth. It would appear that levels were at about five fathoms under each other, and the water was raised to the surface by means of “a winder and keeble, or leathern bags, pumps, or buckets.” Dr. Borlase describes the engines that were employed just after the middle of last century. He took a mine in Illogan as typical. There were seven shafts upon the lode, upon one of which there was a fire-engine working the pumps, and raising the water of the mine to the adit level, twenty fathoms from the surface. Another shaft had a whim upon it, and the remaining six had common winzes at their heads. The walls of the lode were supported by timber, and planks were laid on them for the _deads_, or unprofitable rock. Captains superintended the work. The machines employed were the _water-whim_, the _rag and chain pump_, the _bobs_, and the _fire-engine_. The whim was much the same as the common horse-whim of the present day, employed to draw up the water in kibbles or buckets. The rag and chain pump consisted of an iron chain, furnished at intervals with knobs of cloth, stiffened with leather, which on being turned round a wheel was made to pass through a wooden pump cylinder, twelve or fifteen feet long, and to heave up the water that rose in this cylinder between the knobs of rag. These pumps were worked by hand. The waterwheels with bobs worked other pumps. The machinery seems to us clumsy and imperfect in the extreme.