Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/12

 This composition was really what the Greeks called chalcos and the Romans aes, although these words have usually been improperly translated brass, which is compounded not of copper and tin, but of copper and zinc. There is no reason to suppose that zinc was at all known to the ancients; and, if so, brass, properly so called, was equally unknown to them. What is commonly called the brass of the Greeks and Romans, being, as we have said, a mixture of copper and tin, is not brass, but bronze. This is the material, not only of the ancient statues, but also of many of their other metallic articles both ornamental and useful. It was of this, for instance, that they fabricated the best of their mirrors and reflecting specula; for the composition, in certain proportions, is capable of taking a high polish, as well as of being hammered or filed to a sharp and hard edge in others. This also is the material of which so many of the Celtic antiquities are formed, and which on this account is sometimes called Celtic brass, although it might with as much propriety be called Greek brass, or Roman brass. In like manner the swords found at Cannæ, which are supposed to be Carthaginian, are of bronze, or a composition of copper and tin. Tin, too, is supposed, with much probability, to have been used by the Phoenicians at a very early period in those processes of dyeing cloth for which Tyre in particular was so famous. Solutions of tin in various acids are still applied as mordants for fixing colours in cloth. Tin is understood to be mentioned under the Hebrew term bedil, in the Book of Numbers; and, as all the other metals supposed to have been then known are enumerated in the same passage, it would be difficult to give another probable translation of the word. The lexicographers derive it from bedl, to separate; tin, they say, being a separating metal. This would carry the knowledge and use of tin back to a date nearly 1500 years antecedent to the commencement of our era. At a much later date, the prophet Ezekiel is supposed to mention it under the same name as one of the conmodities in which Tyre traded with Tarshish, probably a general appellation for the