shall presently have occasion to show, was probably imported to some extent in ingots or masses, as well as in manufactured articles. Much of the bronze which was thus brought to them, whether in lumps of metal, or in the shape of weapons of war and other necessary or useful articles, had no doubt been formed by the aid of their own tin. Neither the Britons themselves, nor any of the foreigners who traded with them at this early period, appear to have been aware of the abundant stores of copper which the island is now known to contain. Indeed the British copper-mines have only been wrought to any considerable extent in very recent times.
There is no reasonable ground for supposing, as some writers have done, that the ancient Britons possessed any description of navigating vessels, which could properly be termed ships of war. The notion has been taken up on an inference from a passage in Cæsar, or rather from a comparison of several passages, which the language of that writer rightly understood certainly does not at all authorize. Cæsar gives us in one place an account of a naval engagement which he had with the Veneti of western Gaul, whose ships appear, from his description, to have been very formidable military engines. In a preceding chapter he had informed us, that in making preparations for their resistance to the Roman arms, the Veneti, after fortifying their towns, and collecting their whole naval strength at one point, associated with them, for the purpose of carrying on the war, the Osismii, the Lexobii, and other neighbouring tribes, and also sent for aid out of Britain, which lay directly over against their coast. But it is not said that the assistance which they thus obtained, either from Britain or any other quarter, consisted of ships. It does not even appear that it consisted of seamen; for, although it so happened that the war was terminated by the destruction of the naval power of the Veneti in the engagement we have just mentioned, preparations had evidently been made in the first instance for carrying it on by land as well as by sea. The supposition that the Britons possessed any ships at all resembling the high-riding, strong-timbered, iron-bound
