320 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
of the old real treasures. But even the highest number given to-day reach 
scarcely the treasure mentioned by ancient authorities. King Croesus presented 
to the temple in Delphi 214 talents, nearly $2,000,000 of gold; Phidias used for 
the statue of Minerva in the Parthenon forty talents ; and in the treasury of Ptol- 
emaius Philadelphus was 740,000 talents of gold, about $13,000,000,000. Verres, 
during his short prsetorship in Sicily, appropriated more than $6,000,000 of costly 
objects simply by v;hat he called confiscation. About the mines of precious 
metals and their production before Christ, nothing is sufficiently known. But 
the immense amount of money coined in those times, the costly treasures and 
implements reported to have in existence warrant the supposition of their wealth. 
The first gold coins, stamped only on one side, belong to Asia Minor, and the 
stater from Phoxaia, with the seal, the emblem of the State, dated 600 years 
before Christ. It was followed by the Persian gold coins of Darius. Both seem 
to have been made of gold washed out of the alluvial layers of the Pactolus River. 
The money of Greece was originally of silver. The money of the Romans was at 
first copper, later silver ; gold coins appear not before Sylla, Pompeius and Caesar, 
mostly coined for the triumphal honors of those men. Later, in the time of the 
emperors, large numbers of gold coins appear. 
By far the largest amount of precious metals has undoubtedly been used to 
coin money. The amount of coined money has always been very large, and 
followed, from 1400 to 1800, if graphically expressed by a curve, the standard of 
the value of both metals even nearer than the curve of the production of the 
mines. The advance of trade and industry demands always a larger amount of 
money. The lack of it has been many times seriously felt and complained of 
when the supply of money did not follow at an equal rate the advance of trade. 
The beginning of this century was marked by such a serious lack of coined 
money, probably by the development of trade and industry in England and 
North America. Perhaps the trade with China, which had to be paid in cash, 
with silver which never returned, may have had also some influence. The trade 
in tea and silk alone required to be paid by England and Russia with nearly 
^50,000,000 each year. Smaller sums of silver, also never returning, were ab- 
sorbed by the trade with the interior of Africa. As the merchants there had 
nothing but the so-called Maria Theresa thaler, this coin — long ago out of use in 
Europe — is still made to-day expressly for this trade. The experiment to give at 
least a temporary help for the lack of money with notes or paper money prove to 
be a failure, even in states with such a firmly established credit as England. 
The bank notes lost in London itself, in 1814, about 26 per cent. Therefore, 
the coinage of large sums was decided upon, and in England alone, during the 
ten years from 1821 to 1832, ;^48, 000,000 of sovereigns and ;^32,ooo,ooo sterl- 
ing of silver were coined. The same was done in Russia, and every miner was 
obliged to sell the whole product of precious metals to the imperial mint for a 
fixed price. 
We do not know how much gold or silver coin is in existence. The numbers 
given by the mints, even for comparatively recent times, allow us by no means 
