20 On the Phceniclan Tin Trade in Cornwall, by R. Edmonds. 
and mortar was certainly not peculiar to the Romans. The ancient 
Britons, long before the Roman period, might of themselves, or 
by the instruction of their Phoenician friends for such an unusual 
erection, have made and used both bricks and mortar, although 
we do not find such building materials in their caves or villages, or 
hill or cliff castles. 
Nothing opposed to what I had written in the Arch. Canih. 
appeared until August, ] 862, when, at the Truro meeting of the 
Cambrian Arehgeological Association, it was, to the astonishment of 
Cornish men, especially of those best acquainted with the subject, 
gravely questioned whether the Phcenicians ever visited Cornwall. 
This scepticism arose from Sir George C. Lewis and other authors 
having contended that the tin in Canaan in the days of Moses 
(Numb, xxxi., 22) must have come from India. But they have 
done so without a tittle of evidence, there being no more reason 
for supposing India to have supplied Canaan or Egypt with tin 
3,000 years ago, because tin. is now so largely exported from the 
Isle of Banca, than for imagining Cornwall to have then exported 
copper, as well as tin, because it does so now. 
Dr. George Smith, the author of the " Religion of Ancient 
Britain," in his work on the Cassiterides published in 1863, which 
is a candid, careful, and learned discussion of the facts and argu- 
ments on both sides of the question, proves most clearly that the 
Phoenicians did not bring their tin from India, nor from the east, 
but from Cornwall, with the exception perhaps of a small portion 
from Tartessus. 
At the Annual Meeting of the Ptoyal Institution of Cornwall, 
held at Truro on the 29th of May, 1863, a paper by myself was 
read on the same subject, wherein, in addition to what I had 
previously written, 1 drew attention to the interesting fact of 
Mountsbay having been known to history before the time of Hero- 
dotus, as shown by the following quotation from Diodorus, who 
was evidently not aware that the locality described by Hecataeus 
