“The Lydians,” he begins, “were the first to strike and use coins.” We must remember who it was that he was writing for. His readers would be found mainly in the free cities of European Greece. Down to the days when he ended his history these European Greeks had coined almost exclusively in silver. On the other hand the coinage of Lydia and the other Persian satrapies of Asia Minor consisted of Darics of gold and shekels of silver, and people in those parts doubtless remembered that this coinage in the two metals went back to the days of the Lydian kings. It is a fundamental principle with our historian never to omit any fact that he can possibly insert. In this case an extra fact can be inserted in three words, χρυσοῦ καὶ ἀργύρου, and almost inevitably the words go in. Possibly he had forgotten for the moment the primitive pieces of electrum: it is equally possible that accuracy was sacrificed to fulness of information. Another way of meeting Babelon’s difficulty is suggested by Babelon’s own article. It is generally assumed that the first coins struck in Asia Minor were all of electrum, and that electrum later gave way to gold and silver. But Babelon[685] quotes an example of what is generally regarded as the earliest Lydian electrum type (_ob._ striated, _rev._ three small stamps as on silver spoons) that appears from its specific gravity to contain 98 per cent. silver and weighs 10·81 grammes. This latter is the unit of the so-called Babylonian standard, which is employed almost exclusively for silver, the only exception being a gold issue of Croesus. It is true that the coin has a yellow tint, and that it may contain more than 2 per cent. gold, if the light specific gravity is due partly to the presence of copper[686]. There are cases too of what seem to be unquestionable electrum coins with a very low percentage of gold, _e.g._ _Brit. Mus. Cat. Coins of Ionia_, p. 47, nos. 2, 3, Ephesian thirds of the normal Phoenician standard, one with only 14 per cent. gold to judge by the specific gravity, the other actually with only 5 per cent. But the combined evidence of weight and specific gravity gives strong support to Babelon’s view that the coin must have been intended to pass as silver[687]. Babelon assigns this piece to Miletus, but on no sufficient grounds. As he himself points out[688], the weight is exactly that of the silver coins of Croesus, a weight which in Ionia prevailed only at Colophon and Erythrae in the fifth century and at Miletus in the third[689], and in these three cases was borrowed from the Persian siglos (shekel), which latter was the direct successor of the silver coins of Croesus. The earliest silver coins assigned by Head to Miletus are struck on the Aeginetan standard (185 grains)[690]. In short, if it seems probable that this piece is silver, _a fortiori_ is it probable that it is Lydian, and if, as the evidence all tends to show, this is the case, the importance of the piece at once becomes obvious. It means