14 Transactions of the 



To give the exact date of the introduction of tin would be quite as impossible and an 

 difficult as to name the discoverer of gunpowder, or of the manufacture of glass. In the 

 books of Moses we are told at one point of the " gold and the silver, the brass and the 

 tin." Under the cabalistic sobriquet of Kamieros, Homer sings of it in the Iliad, aa that 

 which gave strength and splendor to the battle-shields of Trojan warriors. By the writ- 

 ings of Pliny and others, we know that as early as between the years 1030 and 1040 before 

 the birth of Christ, the Phoenicians had begun to avail themselves of the immense tin 

 deposits of Cornwall, in the British Isles. And strange as it may appear, these same old 

 mines of Cornwall, after 3,000 years of hard usage, are still the great tin producers of the 

 world, giving us annually from their apparently inexhaustible resources 140,000 hundred- 

 weight of the pure metal. Since the time when the Phoenicians began the transportation 

 of this metal across the English Channel, how comparatively little has been accomplished 

 in the new discovery and development of tin deposits. To be sure, we now have the 

 mines of Banca and Malacca, yielding their annual 100,000 hundred-weight. Then, too, 

 there are the remarkable mines of Bolivia, the reported yield of which has however, in 

 all probability, been greatly exaggerated. Then may be enumerated the lesser deposits of 

 Bohemia, Saxony, and Australia, and associated with the mineral Cryolite (Al2F3,3NaF,) 

 to some considerable extent in Greenland. The Australian tin ore contains also so large 

 a percentage of gold that it may be extracted with profit. Within the past year also a 

 new deposit of most promising character has been discovered upon the Maclntyre river 

 ' in Australia, which bids fair to rival either Cornwall or Banca in its wealth. 



The remarkable absence of anything approaching the character of tin deposits in the 

 United States has been a most unwelcome fact which has long perplexed mineralogists. 

 Not that the mineral Cassiterite or Tin Stone is entirely absent ; for very slight deposits 

 may be found near the town of Chesterfield, Pa. — associated with albite and tourmaline 

 — also near Jackson, N. H., Paris, Maine, in the gold fields of Virginia, in Idaiio, and in 

 California. But in all these localities the metal exists only in such quantities as to be 

 purely of mineralogical, never of metallurgical importance. It is but proper to remark, 

 however, that the supposition is entertained by some that the deposits of San Bernardino 

 county, California, may yet prove of commercial interest, when more fully examined. 



Now in a territory so richly endowed as is that of the United States, with all the min- 

 eralogical wealth that the needs of a high civilization could demand, this lamentable pov- 

 erty in the matter of tin deposits evinces an unwarrantable short-sightedneas on the part 

 of nature. To be compelled to resort to our more favored English brethren on the other 

 side of the Atlantic for a requisite supply of the needed metal has long been a subject of 

 national cliagrin. This impoverished condition of our tin resources has plainly been long 

 felt by American patriotism as a great and a national reproach upon the character of a 

 progressive commonwealth! At least upon no other adequate basis can we explain the 

 efforts to supply this deficiency by the innumerable tin-salting enterprises which the last 

 twenty years have witnessed in this country, some of which have been conceived and car- 

 ried out upon a stupendous scale and with unfaltering energy. It is among these under- 

 takings that the recent "tin mountain" excitement in Missouri may be classified; in some 

 respects one of the most laughable instances in tiie whole calendar of tin frauds, closing 

 with a grand railroad excursion, in wliich a credulous public is said to have stood gaping 

 around two chemists, who were supposed to have produced tlie metal from a rock about as 

 destitute of true cassiterite (tin stone) as a specimen of Jura limestone! 



It is among these instances that these isolated "tin discoveries" are, even in our midst 

 in Kansas, constantly taking place. I am in constant receipt, at my laboratory, of pack- 

 ages of ore from various parts of the State, supposed to abound in tin. Not infrequently 

 a neat little ingot of the pure metal, said to have been found in close proximity to the 

 ore, accompanies each package — the discoverer evidently forgetting that pure tin is one 

 of the rarest elements in the whole realm of mineralogv. But it is to one of these enter- 



