The almost complete absence of specimens of jewellery from the mainland of Greece is due to those acts of pillage which continually took place at localities well known as cemeteries. Only in tombs concealed by their environment, or lost to sight in semi-barbarous countries, have sufficient ornaments been found for us to form an estimate of the perfection which this branch of the industrial arts then attained. The chief sources of these discoveries have been the Crimea, the Greek islands, the west coast of Asia Minor, and Southern Italy--known in ancient times as Magna Græcia. Of these districts by far the most important was that on the northern shore of the Black Sea, called formerly the Tauric Chersonese and now the Crimea, where in close proximity to the warlike Scythian tribes a Greek colony had settled as early as the sixth century before our era. Excavations made also in the adjacent peninsula of Taman have revealed numerous articles of gold, all belonging to the latter half of the century. The wealth of gold on the shores of the Black Sea, which is the basis of the early Greek legends of the Golden Fleece, had attracted merchant adventurers at an early date. And the Greek goldsmiths who settled there forwarded their productions both to their mother-country and to the neighbouring lands of the barbarians. Excavations undertaken by the Russian Government near Kertch, the ancient Pantikapaion, gave rise to an important discovery in 1831, when the opening of the celebrated tumulus Koul-Oba revealed a magnificent display of Greek jewellery. These treasures, and others which the enterprise of the Russian Government has brought to light, are preserved at St. Petersburg in the Museum of the Hermitage. Italy, less systematically ravaged than Greece, has proved exceedingly rich in finds of antique jewellery. Except for a few scattered fragments from Greece proper and the other sources mentioned above, public and private cabinets, outside Russia, are made up almost exclusively of the results of excavations in the burial-places of Magna Græcia.