exports and imports which Strabo gives us. Among the former he mentions gold, silver, and iron, but, strangely enough, neither lead nor tin; corn, cattle, skins,—including both hides of horned cattle and the skins and fleeces of sheep,—and dogs, which he describes as possessing various excellent qualities. In those days slaves were also obtained from Britain as they now are from the coast of Africa; and it may be suspected, from Cicero's allusion already quoted, that this branch of trade was older even than Cæsar's invasion. Cicero seems to speak of the slaves as a well-known description of British produce. These several kinds of raw produce the Britons appear to have exchanged for articles the manufacture of which was probably of more value than the material, and which were, for the greater part, rather showy than useful. The imports enumerated by Strabo are ivory bridles, gold chains, cups of amber, drinking glasses, and a variety of other articles of the like kind. Still, all these are articles of a very different sort from the brass buttons and glass beads, by means of which trade is carried on with savages.
After the establishment of the Roman dominion in the country, its natural resources were no doubt much more fully developed, and its foreign trade both in the way of exportation and importation, but in the latter more especially, must have assumed altogether a new aspect. The Roman colonists settled in Britain of course were consumers of the same necessaries and luxuries as in other parts of the empire; and such of these as could not be obtained in the country were imported for their use from abroad. They must have been paid for, on the other hand, by the produce of the island, of its soil, of its mines, perhaps of its seas, and by the native manufactures, if there were any of these suited to the foreign market.
The chief export of Roman Britain, in the most flourishing times of the province, appears to have been corn. This island, indeed, seems eventually to have come to be considered in some sort as the Sicily of the northern part of the empire; and in the fourth century we find the
