IN SOUTHERN INDIA. 
163 
of call. True no traces of those fine Eoman buildings one 
sees and admires so mucjh. in Europe have been discovered, but 
could one expect to find, in a small community of mercantile 
agents, settled for a short period in the heart of a foreign 
and uncivilized nation, any evidence of their existence that 
would last as many centuries as have rolled by since Roman 
merchants traded in the East, unless it be such coins as I 
describe, struck specially for the purposes of trade with a 
pauper population ? Looking then to the facts that all the 
coins of this series are well worn as though they had been in 
regular circulation, that they are of a type differing from 
those usual to the Imperial mints, that they are of so 
small a value as to be what one would expect to find in 
use when dealing with a people as poor as the early Hindus, 
that they are found almost exclusively in one locality, 
that they are constanthj being found and not occurring in a 
glut at intermittent periods, — surely all these arguments 
point to the possible, if not indeed the probable, truth of the 
theory that they were of local mintage. 
On the obverse of all that I have met with appears an 
emperor's head, but so worn that with one or two exceptions 
the features are well nigh obliterated. In one or two speci- 
mens a faint trace of an inscription appears running rotmd the 
obverse, but hitherto I have not come across a single specimen 
in which more than one or two letters are distinguishable. 
The reverses vary considerably, but the commonest type seems 
to bear the figures of three Roman soldiers standing and 
holding spears in their hands. Another bears a rectangular 
figure somewhat resembling a complete form of the design on 
the reverse of the Buddhist square coins found in the same 
locality, while most are too worn to allow of even a sugges- 
tion as to what their original design was intended to repre- 
sent. On one specimen the few decipherable letters appear 
to form part of the name Theodosius, and the style of coin 
points to the probability of its having been issued during the 
decline of the Eoman Empire, possibly after the capital had 
