Excerpt from The Tin Mines and the Mining Industries of Perak and Other Papers

The duration of the Bronze Period is necessarily unknown, but it is conceded that it must have extended over a very considerable number of centuries. During it, man rose from a state of almost complete savagery to a comparatively high pitch of civilization. Writing was invented, and great advances made in many of the arts and manufactures; nearly all the animals we now keep were domesticated, and the cereals in cultivation, before the commencement of the Age of Iron.

During this time, judging from the abundance of bronze objects of all kinds that have been found, large quantities of tin must have been used. It is considered that the sources from which it was derived were Spain, Britain and Malaya. In the early Iron Period the great navigators of the world were the Phoenicians, and it was they who took tin from England and Spain and the Islands of India to the centres of civilization. There was, however, some other race of navigators who preceded the Phoenicians and exceeded them in the extent of their commercial voyages. Who these people were is uncertain, but the recent investigations into the antiquities of America make it certain that they crossed the Atlantic Ocean and carried on intercourse between the Old World and the New. A few of the discoveries that have been made may be mentioned here, to Show the connection that exists between the old inhabitants of America and those of Europe and Asia. The stone and bronze implements are absolutely identical; the round towers, pyramids and coins are very similar; in both hemispheres embalming the dead, artificially deforming skulls, and the rite of circumcision were practised; and the most con vincing of all is, perhaps, that carved representations of elephants have been found in Central America, and veritable tobacco pipes, associated with prehistoric remains of a period very many centuries before Columbus re introduced the use of tobacco into Europ-, e have been found in Ireland. It is perhaps not improbable that these people, whose existence is recognised by both philologists and antiquarians, may have traded, like their successors the Phoenicians, with the lands of the East, as it is certain they did with those of the West.

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