In the outset a few brief remarks on the uses of a cabinet of antique coins may not be out of place. Of these the first and foremost is the undoubted fact that these “strange face to face vestiges of vanished æons” (to use an expression of Carlyle’s) bring our minds into immediate contact with the life and history of antiquity as no mere book-study can ever do. Not that we would depreciate the value of a knowledge of history; on the contrary, this is the one study which is all important for a collector of coins. Without it a man may indeed become familiar with the look of ancient coins, and he may gain much practical knowledge of the prices which they usually fetch at sales, but he will never be a true Numismatist. If he possess the artistic sense he may admire them as works of art, but beyond this they will be to him as a sealed book. I. GREEK COINS. § INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. The following extract from the preface to the British Museum “Guide to the Coins of the Ancients”[5] will give some idea of the uses of Greek Numismatics. “The chief value of Greek coins lies in their being original works of art, not copies as are most of the extant sculptures in the round, and in their recording the successive phases and local varieties of Greek art, in which respect no other class of monuments, sculptures, bronzes, terracottas, fictile vases, or gems, can compete with them. From the seventh century before the Christian era downwards, and from the farthest east to the extreme west of the ancient civilized world, coins are still extant, in many cases as uninjured as when they first left the dies. The devices or _types_ which they bear, if not by leading artists, certainly faithfully represent the style of the sculpture and even of the painting of the periods to which they belong. Thus in no other branch of Greek monuments can the student so readily and so thoroughly trace the growth, the maturity, and the decay of the plastic art as on coins chronologically arranged. “For the study of mythology they present the local conceptions of the gods and heroes worshipped in the Greek world, with their attributes and symbols. “The historian will find a gallery of portraits of sovereigns almost complete, as well as evidences of the history and of the political revolutions of innumerable autonomous states and cities in these all but imperishable records. “The student of palæography will find on coins examples of various ancient alphabets, such as Lycian and Cyprian, Phœnician, Greek, Latin, Iberian, etc., in various stages of development.