The _cassiteron_, or tin which made the British Islands famous among Phœnician and Greek mariners, long before the Roman legions ventured to cross the narrow seas, was derived, as has been noted, from the same south-western peninsula, where copper is still wrought. The name of Cassiterides, or Tin Islands, bestowed on Cornwall and the adjacent isles, seems to imply that tin was the chief export, and was transported to the Mediterranean, to be mixed with the copper of the Wady Maghara, and other Asiatic mines, to form the Egyptian, Phœnician, and Assyrian bronze. Tin, therefore, the easiest of all metals to subject to the requisite processes, first engaged the skill of the British metallurgist; and that mastered, the proximity of the copper ore in the same mineral districts, inevitably suggests all the subsequent processes of smelting, fusion, and alloy. The practical value of the alloy of copper and tin was well-known both to the Phœnicians and the Egyptians. Tin occurs in considerable abundance, and in the purest state, in the peninsula of Malacca, and thence, probably, it was first brought to give a new impetus to early eastern civilisation. Britain is its next and its most abundant source; and since America was embraced within the world’s sisterhood of nations, Chili and Mexico have become known as productive sources of the same useful metal. But the mineral wealth of Mexico and Peru was familiar to nations of the New World long before it was made to contribute to European commerce; and to a proximity of the metals best suited for the first stages of human progress, corresponding in some degree to that to which Britain’s ancient metallurgy has been traced, the curious phases of a native and purely aboriginal civilisation may be ascribed, which revealed itself to the wondering gaze of the first European adventurers who followed in the steps of Columbus. Whatever doubts may arise relative to the native origin of British metallurgy, and the works of art of the European Bronze Period, in consequence of their most characteristic illustrations being preserved in the mixed metal, bronze, and not in pure copper: there is no room for any such doubts relative to the primitive metallurgy of the New World. The American continent appears to have had its two entirely independent centres of self-originated metallurgic arts: its greatly prolonged but slight progressive Copper Period; and apart from this, and in part at least contemporaneous with it, a separate Bronze Period, with its distinct centres of more advanced civilisation and better regulated metallurgic industry, in which the value of metallic alloys was practically understood.