2 TIN MINING IN PERAK. 
The duration of the Bronze Period is necessarily unknown, but it is 
conceded that it must have extended over a very considerable number 
of centuries. During it, man rose from a state of almost complete 
savagery to a comparatively high pitch of civilization. Writing was 
invented, and great advances made in many of the arts and manufactures; 
nearly all the animals we now keep were domesticated, and the cereals 
in cultivation, before the commencement of the Age of Iron. 
During this time, judging from the abundance of bronze objects of 
all kinds that have been found, large quantities of tin must have been 
used. It is considered that the sources from which it was derived were 
Spain, Britain and Malaya. In the early Iron Period the great navigators 
of the world were the Phoenicians, and it was they who took tin from 
England and Spain and the Islands of India to the centres of civilization. 
There was, however, some other race of navigators who preceded the 
Phoenicians and exceeded them in the extent of their commercial voyages. 
Who these people were is uncertain, but the recent investigations into 
the antiquities of America make it certain that they crossed the Atlantic 
Ocean and carried on intercourse between the Old World and the New. 
A few of the discoveries that have been made may be mentioned here, to 
show the connection that exists between the old inhabitants of America 
and those of Europe and Asia. The stone and bronze implements are 
absolutely identical; the round towers, pyramids and coins are very 
similar; in both hemispheres embalming the dead, artificially deforming 
skulls, and the rite of circumcision were practised; and the most con- 
vincing of all is, perhaps, that carved representations of elephants 
have been found in Central America, and veritable tobacco pipes, 
associated with prehistoric remains of a period very many centuries 
before Columbus re-introduced the use of tobacco into Europe, have been 
found in Ireland. It is perhaps not improbable that these people, whose 
existence is recognised by both philologists and antiquarians, may have 
traded, like their successors the Phoenicians, with the lands of the East, 
as it is certain they did with those of the West. 
So little is known of China and its antiquities that it cannot be stated 
with any degree of certainty where they obtained their tin. The dis- 
covery of the use of metals is placed by Chinese historians as prior to 
the reign of Te Yaou, of the dynasty of Hea, who lived in the year B.C. 
2356. ‘The Emperor Kang-He,” says Forbes, in /7ve Years in China, 
“himself records that bronze money first appeared in the time of the 
founder of the Chon dynasty, B.C. 1105, when Tae-Koung, the minister 
of Woo Wang, introduced round money with a square hole in the 
centre.’ The same author goes on—‘ Notwithstanding that the first 
round money is supposed to be [of] the time of Woo Wang, by the 
Emperor Kang-He, those who make Hwang-te, B.C. 2600, the origi- 
nator of coined metal, state that it was in the form of a cutlass, and was 
called the Kin-taou- pecan, or money of the metal knife. 
Of the Kin-taou coins Here are several kinds, varying in length from 
three to seven inches.” 
It is probable that these so-called “knife coins’ were in the first 
instance actual metal implements which were used as money, though in 
later times they may have been real coins in the shape of implements. 
