TIN AND ITS NATIVE LAND. 237 



in convents and churches, where devotional objects of every kind 

 were made out of it — crosses, chandeliers, holy-water bowls, other 

 vessels, organ-pipes, and pilgrim-standards. It was allowed, with 

 gold and silver, to enter into* the composition of the sacred ves- 

 sels, when wood, lead, copper, and bronze were prohibited as base 

 or insalubrious, and glass on account of its fragility. 



Bishops and priests were buried with their symbols, crosses, 

 and chalices represented in tin. This metal served well in place 

 of silver in the illumination of ancient manuscripts, as it now 

 takes the place of gold in the lacquers of China and Tonquin, in 

 which the metallic luster of tin-foil has given the transparent 

 varnish the yellow shine of gold. Some objects found in the 

 Italian tombs have an interesting resemblance to those of Ton- 

 quin and China. Curiously, the custom of the Chinese and Ana- 

 mites, of burning papers to their ancestors bearing the figures 

 of objects which they use while living, finds its equivalent among 

 the peoples of Europe, who placed in the tombs of their dead tin 

 images of similar objects, such as forks, knives, tongs, tripods, 

 and candlesticks. 



Tin was likewise employed for numerous purposes, often ex- 

 alted ones, in the life of the middle ages. The ceremonial cups in 

 which the wine was formally offered to a sovereign or to a lord 

 making a solemn entry into a city, and the goblets given as prizes to 

 the most adroit bowmen, were usually made of it. So were cups and 

 measures for wine and oil, porringers, and dishes of all sizes. Plates 

 came later. This piece, which it seems to us so natural to set on 

 the table in front of each guest, is not of older use than the twelfth 

 century. Even at that time every plate served in common for 

 two or three persons. Before that, our ancestors ate, as I have 

 done myself, among the rajahs of Oceania, each one taking the 

 morsels with his hand from the common dish. 



Grand commemorative medals, seals affixed to documents, ink- 

 stands, and tokens were struck in tin. The use of this metal was 

 still more general in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth cent- 

 uries. The tin eating-dish came into general use, even among 

 peasants and workingmen, and was provided for animals. Queen 

 Isabella's cats and the Emperor Frederick's hunting-birds had 

 them ; and tin drinking-dishes were made for the royal birds and 

 for song-birds of every kind. Barbers' emblems, to the seven- 

 teenth century, representing a bearded figure, were of tin, to dis- 

 tinguish them from surgeons' signs, which were of yellow metal 

 or brass. 



Relegated till then to the kitchen or the offices of the large con- 

 vents or the houses of the great lords, save in perilous times when 

 it was brought out to take the place of silver plate on the mas- 

 ters" tables, tin passed, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, into 



