TIN. 161 



Herodotus, 450 years before Christ, is believed to allude to the tin 

 islands of Britain under the cabalistic name Cassiterides, derived from 

 the Greek kassiteros, signifying tin. The Phoenicians are allowed to 

 have traded with Cornubia (as Cornwall was called, it is supposed 

 from the horn-like shape of this extremity of England). The Greeks 

 residing at Marseilles were the next to visit Cornwall, or the isles ad- 

 jacent, to purchase tin ; and after them came the Romans, whose 

 merchants were long foiled in their attempts to discover the tin market 

 of their predecessors. 



Camden says : " It is plain that the ancient Britons dealt in tin mines 

 from the testimony of Diodorus Siculus, who lived in the reign of 

 Augustus, and Tiniaus, the historian in Pliny, who tells us that the 

 Britons fetched tin out of the Isle of Icta (the Isle of Wight), in their 

 little wicker boats covered with leather. The import of the passage 

 in Diodorus is that the Britons who lived in those parts dug tin out of 

 a rocky sort of ground, and carried it in carts at low water to certain 

 neighboring islands ; and that from thence the merchants first trans- 

 ported it to Gaul, and afterwards on horseback in thirty days to the 

 springs of Eridanus, or the city of Narbona, as to a common mart. 

 JEthicus too, another ancient writer, intimates the same thing, and 

 adds that he had himself given directions to the workmen." In the 

 opinion of the learned author of the Britannica here quoted, and others 

 who have followed him, the Saxons seem not to have meddled with 

 the mines, or, according to tradition, to have employed the Saracens ; 

 for the inhabitants of Cornwall to this day call a mine that is given 

 over working Attal-Sarasin, that is, the leavings of the Saracens. 



The Cornwall veins, or lodes, mostly run east and west, with a dip 

 — hade, in the provincial dialect — varying from north to south ; yet 

 they are very irregular, sometimes crossing each other, and sometimes 

 a promising vein abruptly narrows or disappears ; or again they spread 

 out into a kind of bed or floor. The veins are considered worth work- 

 ing when but three inches wide. The gangue is mostly quartz, with 

 some chlorite. Much of the tin is also obtained from beds of loose 

 stones or gravel (called shades), and courses of such gravel or tin de- 

 bris are called streams, whence the name stream tin. 



The Australian mines are mainly in the New England district of 

 Northern New South Wales, and the adjoining part of Queensland, and 

 a large part of the ore goes north through Queensland. The value of 

 the tin exported in 1875 from Queensland was £88,224, and from New 

 South Wales (Ann. Rep. Dept. of N. S. W. Mines, 187G), £561,311, cor- 

 responding to 6,058 tons of tin in ingots, besides 2,022 tons of ore. 

 The value of all the tin raised in N. S. Wales, prior to 1875 is £866,461. 

 Beechwood, Victoria, also affords a little tin. 



The annual production of tin in 1871 in Great Britain was 11,320 

 tons, and in Banca and Malacca, 7,500. 



Tin is used in castings, and also for coating other metals, especially 

 iron and copper. Copper vessels thus coated were in use among the 

 Romans, though not common. Pliny says that the tinned articles 

 could scarcely be distinguished from silver, and his use of the words 

 incoquere and ineoctilia seems to imply, as a writer states, that the 

 process was the same as for the iron wares of the present day, by im- 

 mersing the vessels in melted tin. Its alloys with copper are mentioned 

 on page 144. 



