[4] It must have been a proud day for John Aubrey, the Wiltshire
antiquary, when he attended Charles II. and the Duke of York on their
visit to Abury, which the King was told at a meeting of the Royal
Society, in 1663 (soon after its formation), as much excelled Stonehenge
as a cathedral does a parish church. In leaving Abury, the King "cast
his eie on Silbury Hill, about a mile off," and with the Duke of York,
Dr. Charlton, and Aubrey, he walked up to the top of it. Dr. Stukeley,
in his account of Abury, published in 1743, probably refers to another
royal visit, when he notes: "Some old people remember Charles II., the
Duke of York, and the Duke of Monmouth, _riding_ up Silbury Hill."
[5] See Apsley Pellatt's _Curiosities of Glass-Making_, 1849.
[6] 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 Phoenicians 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 Phoenicians 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.