SESSION 1896-97. xli 



Charles the Sooond. He also mentioned that a seventeenth- ccntuiy 

 token of lialph liradley (1662 or 1663) had been found in pulling 

 down the Old Ked Lion at St. Albans. 



The Pkesidext said that this paper, contributed by such 

 a great authority as Sir John Evans, was very interesting. It 

 was matter of regret that the author could not be present so that 

 they might ask him questions about it. Some few years ago ho 

 (the speaker) made some notes of stamps and coins in the British 

 Museum — the stamps being modern, of course, the coins being 

 ancient — with a view to making a natural history on a numis- 

 matic and philatelic basis, and he found about 150 species of 

 plants and animals wonderfully represented on coins principally 

 from the mints of Ancient Greece and Italy. One would like to 

 know of what material these ancient coins were made, so many of 

 them retaining their superscription and figures on the face, after 

 passing through all the vicissitudes to which curi-ency was liable 

 in their day, and being buried under conditions in which they 

 were subjected to -violence and certainly to chemical and other 

 disintegrating action. The gold in the coin under discussion must 

 have undergone some process of alloying to withstand attrition ; 

 pure gold, soft gold, would not have retained the impress of the 

 horse's head and the inscription as this had done. Amongst the 

 coins in the British Museum and others accessible to him were 

 a number which represented in a marvellous degree the acme of 

 pictorial art, not simply conventionalities, but really figures 

 delineated from life. They were mostly from the ancient mints 

 of Southern Italy and Greece. He remembered one delineation 

 of an eagle, in which all the wing-feathers were absolutely correct, 

 and another of a tortoise, in which the number and shape of 

 the plates forming the carapace, which might be overlooked by 

 a popvdar draughtsman, were actually true to nature. Another, 

 that of a field-mouse, an issue of Mctapontum, was readily 

 distinguished from an ordinary mouse of Leucas ; they were 

 perfectly easy to be differentiated. In another case there was 

 a cray-fish from Agiigentum, which was perfectly distinct 

 from the prawns figured on the coins of Tarentum and Catania ; 

 the two were perfectly drawn and engraved, so that there was 

 not the least difiiculty for anyone with even a superficial know- 

 ledge of natural history to distinguish one from the other. He 

 was struck with the remark that the Macedonian Philippus was 

 associated with this coin. The only coins which he had seen 

 with horses upon them were those Avhich had representations of 

 Philip II of Macedon. In the cities sacred to Apollo, the animals 

 figured on the coins as a rule were the mouse, snake, raven, hawk, 

 wolf, and grasshopper. Amongst plants, the olive and laurel were 

 quite unmistakable in their reproduction. There was one, very 

 interesting indeed, fi'om the island of Cimolos, one of the Cyclades, 

 where there was a great deal of fossiliferous chalk, and that was 

 a coin showing a representation of the Echinus^ the only delinea- 

 tion of a fossil in ancient art which he knew of, whether on coinage 



VOL. IX. — PART VIII. D 



