The ancient American miner of Lake Superior never learned to subject his wealth of copper to the action of fire, and transfer it from the crucible to the shapely mould. No such process was needed where it abounded in inexhaustible quantities in a pure metallic state. If, in the midst of such readily available metallic resources, he was found to have used tools of bronze or brass, to have transported the tin or zinc of other regions to his furnaces, and to have laboriously converted the whole into a preferable substitute for the simpler metal that lay ready for his use, it would be difficult indeed to conceive of such as the initial stage in his metallurgy industry. But Britain presents no analogy to this in its development of metallurgy arts. Tin, one of the least widely-diffused of metals, is found there in the greatest abundance, and easily accessible, not as a pure metal, but as an ore which is readily reduced by charcoal and a moderate degree of heat to that condition. This was the metallic wealth for which Britain was sought by the ancient traders of Massilia, and the fleets of the Mediterranean; and on it we may therefore assume her primitive metallurgists to have first tried their simple arts. But alongside of it, and even in natural combination with it, as in tin pyrites and the double sulphuret, lies the copper, also in the condition of an ore, and requiring the application of the metallurgist’s skill before it can be turned to account. We know that at the very dawn of history tin was exported from Britain. Copper also appears to have been wrought, from very early times, in North Wales as well as in Cornwall. Both metals were found rarely, and in small quantities, in the native state, but these may have sufficed to suggest the next step of supplying them in larger quantities from the ores. To seek in some unknown foreign source for the origin of metallurgic arts, which had there all the requisite elements for evoking them, seems wholly gratuitous; and, if once the native metallurgist learned to smelt the tin and copper ores, and so had been necessitated to subject them to preparatory processes of fire, the next stage in progressive metallurgy, the use of alloys, was a simple one. It might further be assumed that, with the discovery of the valuable results arising from the admixture of tin with copper, the few pure copper implements—excepting where already deposited among sepulchral offerings,—would for the most part be returned to the melting-pot, and reproduced in the more perfect and useful condition of the bronze alloy. There seems, however, greater probability in the supposition that if Britain had a copper period, or age of unalloyed metals, it was of brief duration.