180 On St Michael’s Mount and the Pheenicians. 
from the late Sir George C. Lewis, stating he was satisfied 
that St Michael’s Mount ‘“‘ was the port from which the tin 
was shipped for the coast of Gaul.” The pamphlet thus 
concludes, “‘ I do not think it necessary to discuss the claims 
of the Isle of Wight to be considered the Iktis, as the de- 
scription of the place does not now, and could not at any 
time have applied to it in any one particular.” This agrees 
with my own remarks in respect of the Isle of Wight. 
Sir Henry has confined himself to the places where this 
block of tin was shipped and lost. I have elsewhere* 
pointed out the very spot where it was probably cast into 
its most singular shape before it was carried to its place 
of shipment. This spot is at the mouth of the stream, half 
a mile north of the Mount. By a temporary diversion of 
the stream in 1849, a deep section was made in the sand- 
hillock forming its western boundary. On that occasion 
my nephew (Frederic Bernard Edmonds) and myself dis- 
covered, two or three yards beneath the surface, remains of 
aucient walls rudely built of unhewn stones, and close by 
them great quantities of ashes, charcoal, slag, broken pot- 
tery of very rude manufacture, brick, and fragments of a 
bronze vessel resting with their outsides on charcoal. A con- 
siderable portion of the copper had combined with the char- 
coal during the lapse of ages, and a beautiful green sub- 
stance had resulted—the carbonate of copper. Two of the 
fragments, each about 6 inches long, 4 wide, and only | 
the sixteenth of an inch thick, had been evidently parts of 
the circular top or edge of a furnace (3 feet in diameter) 
bent back into a horizontal rim, three quarters of an inch 
broad. No charcoal was on the insides of the fragments, 
but their outsides were completly blackened and covered 
with it. Diodorus speaks of two fusions; the tin ore being 
no doubt, as at present, first smelted in contact with the 
fuel; and the metal, thus purified, being afterwards melted 
in furnaces by fire applied only externally. For the latter 
process, this very ancient bronzet furnace was probably 
* The Land’s End District, p. 9. 
t In Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon (abridgment), 1859, it is 
stated that “Tin was usually melted and cast upon bronze.”’ But it is now 
melted in iron, and the diameter of the iron furnace used at Messrs Bolitho’ 
