Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/62

 prophet, to Spain, probably came thence only in small quantities; though some is, indeed, still found in Porto, Beira, and Bragança, and was exhibited in the Exhibition of 1862. The great bulk, however, of this metal was brought from the ''Cassiterides Insulæ'', unquestionably the Scilly Islands, and from Cornwall; partly, as may be readily believed, by Phœnician vessels which sailed thither from Gades, and partly from St. Michael's Mount, whence it was conveyed, through France, on the backs of horses, as Diodorus has pointed out, to the great Roman colonies of Marseilles and Narbonne.

In the Museum at Truro is still preserved a pig of tin, supposed by some to be one of the original Phœnician blocks. It is impossible to assign even a probable period for the commencement of the tin trade; but this is certain, that some of the earliest objects in metal which have come down to us, are formed of an alloy of copper with tin, generally in nearly the same proportions, viz. ten to twelve per cent. of tin. Such monuments are the nails which fastened on the plates of the so-called Treasury of Atreus at Mycenæ, the instruments found in the earliest Egyptian tombs, the bowls and lion-weights from Nineveh, and the so-called "celts" from European graves. All these facts tend to show that the ancient world must have been acquainted with tin at a very remote period.

There has been much discussion as to the meaning of the word cassiteros, which has no equivalent in either the Semitic or the Greek families of languages; on the other hand, the Sanscrit name for tin, kastira,