C. 2.--Aristotle's work does no more than mention our islands, as
being, like Ceylon, not pelagic, but oceanic. To early classical
antiquity, it must be remembered, the Ocean was no mere sea, but a
vast and mysterious river encircling the whole land surface of the
earth. Its mighty waves, its tides, its furious currents, all made it
an object of superstitious horror. To embark upon it was the height
of presumption; and even so late as the time of Claudius we shall find
the Roman soldiers feeling that to do so, even for the passage of the
Channel, was "to leave the habitable world."

C. 3.--But while the ancients dreaded the Ocean, they knew also that
its islands alone were the source of one of the most precious and
rarest of their metals. Before iron came into general use (and the
difficulty of smelting it has everywhere made it the last metal to
do so), tin had a value all its own. It was the only known substance
capable of making, along with copper, an alloy hard enough for cutting
purposes--the "bronze" which has given its name to one entire Age of
human development. It was thus all but a necessary of life, and was
eagerly sought for as amongst the choicest objects of traffic.

C. 4.--The Phoenicians, the merchant princes of the dawn of history,
succeeded, with true mercantile instinct, in securing a monopoly of
this trade, by being the first to make their way to the only spots
in the world where tin is found native, the Malay region in the East,
Northern Spain and Cornwall in the West. That tin was known amongst
the Greeks by its Sanscrit name _Kastira_[14] ([Greek: kassiteros])
shows that the Eastern source was the earliest to be tapped. But the
Western was that whence the supply flowed throughout the whole of the
classical ages; and, as the stream-tin of the Asturian mountains seems