EXCERPT Cornish discovery of tin in Malaysia, where the continual flow of the Sungai river and its tributaries has deposited, through the Kinta valley, a cassiterite-rich alluvium, can be dated back as early as the 1830s, when Captain Tremenheere penned his ‘Report on the Tin of the Province of Mergui, in Tnasserim, in the northern part of the Malayan Peninsula’. Tremenheere reports that the streams are rich in tin, and that pits had evidently been dug to catch it. In an experimental assay, he had men collect the equivalent of nineteen ounces of pure tin in one and a half hours.…