Mediæval London yields the collector many choice pieces. Beautiful little scale beams of bronze and brass have been found in or near London Wall. Scales of antiquity, too, have sometimes been in the possession of old families for centuries almost without their knowing or appreciating their value. Not long ago some beautiful little scales made of brass, which must have been made more than two hundred years ago, were picked up on an old barrow where the man who bought "odd things" had it for sale and thought it to be one of the almost valueless curios in the remains of sundries he had bought from the caretaker of an empty house. In the Guildhall Museum there are scales and weights of types usual in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. One of these is decorated with a band of stars, another of triangular shape is stamped with a merchant's mark--that also was found on the site of London Wall. Another remarkably interesting curio is an octagonal weight evidently answering the purpose of a baker's weight, and perhaps as an advertisement, too, for it is engraved, "WEIGHT OF A QUARTERN LOAF, SOLD BY JAMES BULL, 124, LEADENHALL STREET." Our Standards. [Illustration: FIG. 58.--A PINT MEASURE OF THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH. FIG. 59.--A WINCHESTER PINT OF THE DAYS OF QUEEN ANNE.] [Illustration: FIG 60.--OLD FRENCH WEIGHTS. (_In the British Museum._)] In this connection it may be pointed out that a very pleasing collection can inexpensively be made out of old money changers' weights, both English and foreign. They were chiefly used with the pocket scales at one time carried about by traders as a precaution against the numerous clipped and light-weight coins in circulation. Among these little weights are those which were used for testing what are now obsolete gold coins, such as angel, guinea, half-guinea, and seven-shilling piece. Some of the old Roman bell weights are interesting; they took their shape from more ancient weights in the form of a pagan deity, probably Mercury, who was looked upon as a god of scales and weights. In some collections larger Continental weights are met with; those illustrated in Fig. 60 representing three French weights preserved in the British Museum.