DEPARTMENT OF GEOLOGY 



Editors \ P'°^- ^'^^- ^- Perkins, Waterville 



I C. Vey Holman, Rockland 



POSSIBILITIES OF TIN MINING IN MAINE 



By C. Vey Holman 



Of all the metals commercially used in economic quanti- 

 ties, none is of commoner or more widespread employment 

 than tin. From the first toy rattle of the babe, up through 

 the interminable line of indispensable articles of culinary 

 and other domestic use, and the vast world of cans, boxes 

 and similar containers for food-products, oils, paints and 

 other liquids requiring hermetic sealing and nonleakability 

 for their safe preservation, convenient handling and free- 

 dom from contamination, as well as the limitless sphere of 

 industrial alloys including bearing metal and solders, in th*-^ 

 composition of which it is an indispensable ingredient, tin 

 presents itself as a factor of universal usefulness to man. 



Yet most people, including even those who are intimately 

 connected with the management of industrial concerns con- 

 suming tin in enormous quantities, know little of the nature 

 of the metal, its source of origin, methods of production, or 

 its true value as an indispensable factor in the modern 

 business world's scheme of assembly, storage and distribu- 

 tion of food and other supplies. 



Still fewer know or realize that although tin has been 

 in common use since prehistoric times, the sources of supply 

 of the metal, in the form of mineral deposits have ever been 

 extremely limited and that, though the world has been 

 ransacked since the days of the Phoenicians by skilled and 

 daring miners of every race, commercial supplies of tin 

 are today, as for thousands of years they have been, drawn 

 from practically but three localities, Cornwall in England, 

 the Malayan peninsula and islands in Asia, and Bolivia in 

 South America. From what sources were drawn the tin 

 mentioned by Old Testament writers and the greater portion 

 of that the use of which in alloy with copper characterized 

 that earlier period of human industrial development known 

 as the Age of Bronze, must always remain the subject of 

 speculation, land its consideration here would -be purely 

 academic. 



We know that the Phoenicians of remote antiquity and 

 their children, colonists and trading successors, the 



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