twenty thousand pieces have been preserved, presenting more than a thousand different dies, and coined in about seventy towns in the eastern and northern districts of the dominions of the Caliphs. Five-sixths of them were coined by Samanidic Caliphs. Together with the coins, a great mass of ornaments has been dug up, consisting of rings and other articles in silver, which are distinguished by a peculiar workmanship. On the whole, it appears that silver first came by this way into the North, where it was not generally circulated before the ninth and tenth centuries, and consequently at the time when the trade with Arabia was in full activity. These discoveries of Arabian coins in the north of Europe, but which are confined to the shores of the Baltic, the German Ocean, and the Irish Sea, undoubtedly prove that Scandinavia, and particularly the countries on its eastern coasts, together with the islands of Gothland, Öland, and Bornholm, must have been the principal depôt for Arabian merchandise. It was the trade with the East that originally gave considerable importance to the city of Visby in Gothland; and it was subsequently the Russian trade that made Visby, in conjunction with Novgorod, important members of the German Hanseatic league. As long as the Arabian trade flourished, Gothland was the centre of a very animated traffic. Even now an almost incredible number of German, Hungarian, and particularly Anglo-Saxon coins, of the tenth and eleventh centuries, is dug up in the island. The collection of coins in Stockholm comprises an assortment of Anglo-Saxon coins, mostly the product of these discoveries, which, for extent and completeness, surpasses the greatest collections of the sort even in London and England.