It is the considered opinion of certain British numismatists that not only all English but also Gaulish coins are barbarous and degraded imitations of a famous Macedonian original which at one time circulated largely in Marseilles. This supposititious model is illustrated on page 394, and the reader can form his own opinion as to whether or not the immense range of subjects which figure on our native money could by any possibility have unconsciously evolved from carelessness. Sir John Evans, by whom this theory was, I believe, first put forward, is himself at times hard-driven to defend it; nevertheless he does not hesitate to maintain: "The degeneration of the head of Apollo into two boars and a wheel, impossible as it may at first appear, is in fact but a comparatively easy transition when once the head has been reduced into a form of regular pattern".[31] My irregularity carries me to the extent of contending that our native coins, crude and uncouth as some of them may be, are in no case imitations but are native work reflecting erstwhile national ideas. The weird designs and what-nots which figure on these tokens almost certainly were once animated by meanings of some sort: they thus constitute a prehistoric literature expressed in hieroglyphics for the correct reading of which one must, in the words of Carlyle, consider History with the beginnings of it stretching dimly into the remote time, emerging darkly out of the mysterious eternity, the true epic poem and universal divine scripture. According to Tacitus the British, under Boudicca, brought into the field an incredible multitude; that Cæsar was impressed by the density of the inhabitants may be gathered from his words: "The population is immense; homesteads closely resembling those of the Gauls are met with at every turn, and cattle are very numerous".[32] That the handful of Roman invaders eliminated the customs and traditions of a vast population is no more likely than the supposition that British occupation has eradicated or even greatly interfered with the native faiths of India. It is generally admitted that the Romans were most tolerant of local sensibilities, and there is no reason to assume that existing British characteristics were either attacked or suppressed. To assume that some hundreds of years later the advent of a few boat-loads of Anglo-Saxon adventurers wiped out the Romano-British inhabitants and eradicated all customs, manners, and traditions is an obvious fallacy under which the evidence of folklore does not permit us to labour. The greater probability is that the established culture imposed itself more or less upon the new-comers, more particularly in those remote districts which it was only after hundreds of years that the Saxons, by their conventional policy of peaceful penetration, punctuated by flashes of frightfulness, succeeded in dominating.