Note 6 — BRITAIN BEFORE THE ROMAN COLONIZATION.

This is a much contested question among ethnologists and other authors. Mr. Craufurd and Sir George Cornewall Lewis totally disbelieve in the voyage of the Phœnicians to the Scilly Islands, through which they are imagined to have supplied the Eastern world with Cornish tin; since they are not likely to have performed the requisite voyage from the entrance of the Mediterranean, 1,000 miles in a straight line over a stormy sea; but Sir Charles Lyell considers it would have been much safer for the Phœnicians to come round by sea than trust their cargoes through Gaul, then not sufficiently safe to be a highway for trade. Nor is there any tin in the Scilly Islands; but Sir Henry James shows that the Cassiterides, where the tin was obtained, is St. Michael's Mount. Sir Henry has recently found in the bed of the harbour of Falmouth an ancient wrecked ingot of tin, of precisely that shape and weight which would adapt it as half-cargo for a horse, balanced by a similar ingot on the other side. The metal was thus conveyed along our southern coast to a favourable place for embarkation, whence the cargoes crossed the Channel and were taken overland through Gaul to the Mediterranean. The ingot discovered at Falmouth resembled in form an astragalus or knuckle-bone, the shape being convenient for slinging over the back of a horse; and it is important to notice that Diodorus Siculus uses the term astragali in describing the shape of the tin-blocks brought from the island of Ictis, which there could be no doubt was the same as St. Michael's Mount. The ingot weighs 120 pounds, and the form of the under-surface is such as to adapt it for resting on the bottom of a boat. Sir Henry believes, with Sir Charles Lyell, that in more ancient times, previous to the Roman occupation of Gaul, tin was conveyed to the Mediterranean round the coasts of Gaul and Lusitania; but more recently, as Diodorus Siculus states, it was carried by land after crossing the narrow part of the Channel. The miners of the present day sometimes find bronze weapons in old tin-works. It is not necessary to assume that these were imported, as there is plenty of copper in Cornwall. It is believed they were manufactured there, and that a vast proportion of the bronze weapons of antiquity were actually made in Cornwall and exported.