The _utile_ and the _dulce_ of the study of numismatics are shown in many ways. Caraccio, Aretine, and Raphael studied the figures on the old oboli and drachmas. So did Le Brun. Rubens was the most conscientious coin and medal gatherer of his time, and applied them sedulously to the furtherance of his divine gifts. Petrarch found time between his sonnets to Laura to make the first classified collection on record, which he presented to the emperor of Germany, with his well-known and remarkable letter. Alphonso, king of Naples, visited all parts of Europe gathering coins in an ivory casket. The splendid Cosmo de' Medici commenced a cabinet which formed the nucleus of the Florentine collection. Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary, made a cabinet, and Francis I. of France laid the foundation of the Paris collection--the finest in the world. All artists recognize the value of coins, medals, and medallions. From them they get the model faces and heads of the Greek and Roman, the copies of lost statues, the folds of the chlamys and the graceful sweep of the toga, the eagles and ensigns, rams and trophies, the altars, idols, and sacrifices, the Olympian games, and the instruments of music, mathematics, and mechanics. They reveal the secrets of a thousand antiquated names and ceremonies, which but for the engraver's chronicle must have been utterly lost. Coins throw additional light upon history. They illuminate the dark passages, clear away the obscurities, and bridge over the gaps. Hugo, in 'Les Miserables,' says men solidified their ideas in architecture before the printed page came from the brain of Faust. He might have added, they wrote their histories upon these bits of gold, silver, iron, brass, and bronze. Vaillant wrote the chronicles of the kings of Syria from a jar of medals, as Cuvier would build up the mastodon and give you the monster's habits from a tooth or a tibia. The Roman denarii give the best idea of Caesar's well in the forum. The Epidaurian coins with the snake of AEsculapius tell in brief characters how the Roman senate sent an embassy to the great father of medicine to come and heal them of the plague. The migration of the Phocian colony to Asia Minor is succinctly told in the [Greek: phoche], or seal, which followed the early Mayflower stamped upon one of the earliest of the Grecian coins. The late coins of the Grecian series, with the portraits of Alexander, Ptolemy, Seleucus, Lysimachus, and others, have lent to the historian a fresh and life-like picture of those stern days, and have been silent but incontrovertible witnesses of the truth of the records which have come down to us. Cymbeline, of Shakspeare, dates back to the Cunobelin of an ancient Saxon coin, struck before Boadicea's time. Who would have known of the Grecian domination in Bactria, long after Alexander's time, but for a casual traveller who found the fact, together with a lost language, upon