dawn on history as the source of this most ancient alloy. Strabo's description of the natives of the Cassiterides is not to be greatly relied upon. According to him they were a nomade pastoral race, of peaceful and industrious habits; but he refers especially to their mines of tin and lead, the produce of which they exchanged with the foreign traders, along with furs and skins, for earthenware, salt, and copper vessels and implements. It is scarcely possible to conceive of such an intercourse carried on for centuries, by nations far advanced in the arts, and familiar with the civilisation and learning of the oldest races of Asia and Africa, without the natives of the Cassiterides acquiring from them some knowledge of the fruits of ancient civilisation. From them, indeed, it has been supposed that the British miner first learned even to smelt the ores, though we are almost forced to the conclusion that the working of the mines must have originated with natives or new colonists, familiarized in some degree with the nature of the metals, and with metallurgic arts. It seems surprising, however, that relics formed of the most abundant native metal, tin, should not be found in the tumuli. The facility with which it could be wrought rendered it readily convertible into personal ornaments, equally beautiful as those so abundant in copper and bronze. Borlase describes a patera of tin found at Bossens, in the parish of St. Erth, Cornwall, in 1756, rudely inscribed in mixed characters,--λIVIVS . MOδESTVS δηIVλI . F . ΔEO . MARTI.[227] Along with this were two other vessels of the same metal, an uninscribed patera, and a vase or præfericulum. In 1793 a tin cup of singular form was found, along with a circular ornament of bronze, evidently of native British workmanship, in searching for the ore in a stream work called Hallivich, in the same county,[228] so that we are not without some evidence that this metal was employed at an early period in the manufacture of sacred and domestic vessels. Probably, indeed, we should infer, from the great rarity of such relics, that it was only so used before its native workers had learned to mix it with copper and produce the more useful alloy which superseded the pure metals; as bronze and copper appear to have been at first imported, and received in exchange for the pure tin. Barter, however, could not possibly be continued for centuries, exchanging the ore of a metal so readily fusible as tin for wrought materials of copper, whether pure or alloyed--a metal found in the same locality, in a state requiring little smelting to bring it into use-without the British miner and trader learning to turn their own native mineral wealth to account. The facilities of a metallic currency were also little likely to remain unappreciated by the British trader, familiar as these already were to the seamen of the Mediterranean, or the Phœnician colonists of Cadiz, the ancient Gadeira. Independently of