may be of the phrase "inwards from Britain," and from whatever point these natives may be supposed to have commenced their six days' voyage, the important fact remains that the tin was only dug up in the west of Devon and Cornwall; so that the island of Mictis cannot be thought to have been at a distance from the British coast. To make any sense of the passage, it must be supposed to have lain at six days' voyage from the mineral district; and it seems probable that we can identify it with the Isle of Thanet, at which the marts were established, from which the merchants made the shortest passage to Gaul. The passage in this view must be taken to mean, that the native boats took a week to pass between the tin districts and the parts visited by Pytheas. The mineral region was described by Posidonius, whose travels have already been mentioned; he drew a lively picture of the inhabitants and the nature of their commerce, which is preserved in the Collections of Diodorus. The account of his visit to Cornwall, which he called "Belerium," a name afterwards appropriated by Ptolemy to the particular cliff now called Land's End, is to the following effect :-" The inhabitants of that promontory of Britain which is called Belerium are very fond of strangers, and from their intercourse with foreign merchants are civilized in their manner of life. They prepare the tin, working very skilfully the earth in which it is produced. The ground is rocky, but it contains earthy veins, the produce of which is ground down, smelted, and purified. They make the metal up into slabs shaped like knuckle-bones, and carry it to a certain island lying off Britain called Ictis. During the ebb of the tide the intervening space is left dry, and to this place they carry over abundance of tin in their waggons. And a

very singular thing happens with regard to the islands in these parts lying between Europe and Britain; for at the flood the intervening passage is overflowed, and they seem like islands; but a large space is left dry at the ebb, and then they seem to be peninsulas. Here, then, the merchants buy the tin from the natives, and carry it over to Gaul; and after travelling overland for about thirty days, they finally bring their loads on pack-horses to the outlet of the Rhone (i.e. the junction of the Rhone and Sâone, where the wharfs for the tin-barges were erected)." The trade is also described in the following passages, which may be cited as showing the distinction which was known to exist between the Cornish tin trade and the commerce with the Cassiterides, which was of a much higher antiquity :-" Posidonius says that the tin is not found on the surface, as many authors have alleged, but is dug up; and that it is produced both among the barbarians beyond Lusitania and also in the islands called Cassiterides. And that from the British Isles tin is carried to Marseilles." And, after giving the account. already quoted of the "many mines of tin in the little. islands called Cassiterides lying off Iberia," Diodorus proceeds as follows: "Much tin is also carried across from Britain to the opposite shore of Gaul, and is thence carried on horseback through the midst of the Celtic country to the people of Marseilles, and also to the city of Narbonne."

The port whence most of the traffic went to Gaul must have been at the narrow part of the Channel, as it was in the time of Cæsar, who crossed from the Portus Itius,

Diod. Sic. v. 38; Strabo, iii. 177.

supposed to be the village of Wissant, near Cape Grisnez, then called the Itian Promontory. The island, which was a peninsula at low water, where the stores of tin were collected, may easily have been the Isle of Thanet, which has only been joined to the mainland in modern times. Bede tells us, that in the 7th century there was a ferry over the estuary between Thanet and Kent, which was nearly half a mile across at high tide, and the broad stream with ferry boats and people fording the passage at low water is depicted on certain ancient maps which belonged to Saint Augustine's Abbey at Canterbury. The estuary, now represented by the slender stream of the Wantsume River, was not completely silted up at any point until the reign of Henry VIII., when a chronicler cited the testimony of eight men then living, who had seen barges and merchant vessels sail at high tide along the whole channel from Richborough to Reculver.' There would probably have been no doubt about the identity of the "Mictis" of Pytheas, and the "Ictis" of Posidonius and Diodorus, with the island lying so nearly opposite to the

Itian Port," if it were not for the silting up of the channels: these in ancient times had made the Kentish islands along the southern bank of the estuary of the Thames to seem like peninsulas at the ebb, while they were true islands at the flood. But as the peculiar circumstances of the case became forgotten, it became usual to look for "Ictis" in another direction; and it is now generally supposed to be identical with St. Michael's Mount in Mount's Bay, the only place on the southern coast which, in the present day, corresponds to the details

1 Twine, "De Reb. Albion." i. 25. The old map of Thanet in this chapter was first published by Dugdale in the "Monasticon."

of the ancient description. But it should be remembered, that from the existence of the submarine forest in Mount's Bay, and the Cornish tradition that in ancient times the neck between the mount and the mainland was never reached by the tide, it is more than probable that in the age of Pytheas the present island or peninsula would not have corresponded in any way with the description of the island of Ictis. And this theory is borne out by the old Cornish name for the mount, which Leland and Carew have preserved, the place being called "Cara Cowze in Clowze," or the Hoar Rock in the Wood.1

1 Carew, Survey of Cornwall, 154. Leland, in his Itinerary, describes the rock as 66 Carreg lug en Kug, or Le Hore rok in the Wodd," according to his antique manner of spelling. It is fair to say that writers of authority prefer to accept the common theory which identifies Ictis with St. Michael's Mount, though Ptolemy's identification of the place with the Isle of Wight is of course rejected by every one. Mr. Kenrick says of the passage in Diod. Sic. v. 22. (Phœn. 220): "In this passage the true site of the tin-mines is described: they are found chiefly in the south-western corner of Cornwall, in Gwennap, Polgooth, and Redruth; and the island which at low water is joined to the mainland can be no other than St. Michael's Mount, which was excellently adapted from this circumstance to be the place of trade between foreign dealers and the inhabitants of the continent. Some of the principal tin-mines are in the immediate neighbourhood of Mount's Bay. As the Phoenicians made no settlements in Britain, and merely anchored their vessels first at the Scilly Islands, and afterwards at Mount's Bay, returning at the close of summer to the south of Spain, it is not wonderful that no inscriptions or monuments of any kind attest their presence or their influence in our island. It is, however, by no means improbable that the tin which came originally from Cornwall may have returned thither from Gaul or Spain, in the form of those instruments of bronze which are some of the earliest of our British antiquities in metal." He adds: "From a similarity of sound Vectis (the Isle of Wight) has been supposed to be the Ictis of Diodorus; but it can never have been joined at low water to Hampshire in the Roman times; nor would it be at all a convenient market for the tin of Cornwall." Pliny (iv. 16) places Vectis between England and Ireland; and Timæus, pro

Here we may leave the subject of the visit of Pytheas to South Britain, and will pass in the next chapter to what is known of his travels in Germany and the Baltic, and of his celebrated journey to the Arctic regions.

bably misunderstanding Pytheas, has transferred Ictis to the site of Thule. "Six days' sail" is the distance from Britain at which Pytheas placed Thule (Plin. ii. 75), and the introrsus of Pliny (iv. 16) means, on the eastern side of Britain, as Pytheas certainly navigated the German Ocean. See also Barham, Tract on the subject of Ictis, Geol. Soc. Corn. iii. 88, and De la Beche's Geol. Report, p. 524.