258 Lassen on the History traced |_No. 99. 



It will be necessary to specify more accurately the writings 

 in which these discoveries are described, and the coins re- 

 presented. 



Mr. Masson has described his discoveries in three accounts,* 

 his statements being of singular value, concerning the places 

 of discovery, and the geography of some points in Cabul. His 

 collection contains already more than 7000 coins, not all of 

 which, however, refer to the Bactrian Greeks and to their Indo- 

 Scythian successors. The interpretation of the coins, and the 

 inferences joined to it, prove indeed, that Mr. Masson has not 

 enjoyed a learned education ; he is beside destitute in Cabul of all 

 scientific materials; grateful therefore for such a laudable expen- 

 diture of time and labour, and for such a noble zeal, we shall not 

 criticise his deficiencies, and willingly receive from him all that is 

 capable of proof. Mr. Masson, I believe, served first in the 

 artillery, and he knows certainly much better how to deal with 

 numismatic inquiries, than most numismatists would know 

 how to serve a gun. 



The most instructive accounts from India on the newly dis- 

 covered monuments of the Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Scythian 

 period, we undoubtedly owe to Mr. James Prinsep, Secretary to 

 the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. He has communicated to us 

 continued accounts of all new discoveries, has carefully and 

 accurately edited the coins, and has, with great diligence and 

 acuteness, tried to explain them, and by demonstrating the con- 

 nexion between the Indian and the Indo-Scythian numismatics, 

 first established an entirely unexpected new and important fact. 

 His decypherings of the native medalography, and his interpre- 

 tations of the native legends in Greek characters, leave to succeed- 

 ing inquirers only the task of rectifying and defining more 

 precisely a few isolated points. He deserves the higher praise, 

 as he is his own teacher in the province of numismatics, origi- 

 nally foreign to his studies. His beautiful discoveries in the old 

 Indian paleography, concern, more nearly than he perhaps pre- 

 sumed himself, the explanation of the Bactrian coins, and we 

 are entitled to expect still richer contributions from his ardour. 



* In the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. iii p. 152, with en- 

 gravings, which leave much to be desired. 



