XV 



specific gravity to be 16-52 at 60° Fahr., aiid its composition, 



Gold 90-12* 



Silver 9-05 . 



Silica with sesqui-oxide of iron 0-83 



100 



The same accomplished analyst promises an examination of a 

 second specimen, obligingly obtained for him from Captain 

 Knight, of Trecarne, by Mr. Francis Michell, of Truro. 



As of late years much has been vi^ritten and said concerning 

 the waste of copper ore by the miners, towards the end of the 

 seventeenth century, and in the beginning of the eighteenth, it 

 seems desirable to examine the evidence on which such statements 

 are founded, more closely than perhaps it may have been hitherto 

 examined. Dr. Bdrlase, Dr. Pryce, Mr. William Phillips, and Mr. 

 AVarington Wilkinson Smyth, are amongst the principal, but Mr, 

 Carew, Mr. Hals, and Mr. Tonkin are the earliest, t writers on 

 copper-mining in Cornwall. 



Dr. Borlase, writing in 1758, said that the yellow ore, which 

 then sold for " between ten and twenty pounds per ton, was . . . 

 about sixty years [earlier, namely, about 1698] called j^oder (that 

 is, dust), and thrown away as mundic."| 



Dr. Pryce stated in 1778 that " seventy years ago " [that is 

 to say, in 1708] black copper-ore was thrown "into the rivers 

 as refuse, by the name of Foder, which signifies dust, Mundick, 

 or waste." || 



Mr. Phillips, in 1814, mentioned rb as "an undoubted fact 

 that . . . within a century . . . many roads in the county were 

 mended with copper-ore." § 



Mr. Smyth remarked in 1852, that "at the commencement of 

 the last century Eedruthite (vitreous copper) was thrown as worth- 



* " The average proportion of gold in the native gold of California is 80-00 



Australia 92-50." 

 Dana, System of Mineralogy (.Srd Edition), p. 5. 



•|- Mr. Norden (Speculi Britannia Pars, pp. 9, 17, 34, 40 — 2) mentions 

 the occurrence of copper-ore in several parts of West Cornwall, but he is 

 silent as to its extraction. 



+ Natural History of Cornwall, p. 205. 



II Mineralogia Cornuhiensis, p. 63. 



§ Geol. Trans., ii (o.s.), p. 141. 



