NUMISMATICS.
It was formerly supposed that prior to the invasion of Cæsar the Britons did not possess a coinage of their own, and indeed, the testimony of Cæsar himself has been often adduced in support of the opinion of those who assign the origin of a British stamped currency to a period subsequent to the Roman conquest of Britain.
The patient labour and indefatigable zeal, with which, in the present day, numismatists have prosecuted researches on the early and obscure coins found throughout England, have, however, gone far towards establishing a satisfactory appropriation of many of them to periods anterior to the invasion of Cæsar, and have determined others to have been struck in Britain posterior to the Roman domination.
Indeed, when it is considered that Cæsar came into Britain as a military invader, that his stay was brief and confined, and his means of obtaining information necessarily circumscribed and difficult, we shall be justified in qualifying his statement that the Britons used iron rings instead of coins, in the belief that metallic rings worn as ornaments may have been applied to the purposes of money.
It is very clear that many of the rude coins found in this country present types distinct from those on the purely Gaulish coins, and which types cannot be traced to have been derived from Roman models. Like the earliest Gaulish, they seem to be imitations of Greek coins, more or less resembling the originals, but often so rudely copied, that it is only by comparison with others graduating towards similitude to the prototypes, that the fantastical objects upon them can be detected as imitated portions of designs on Greek coins, deteriorated more and more, by ignorant workmen attempting to imitate bad copies without a knowledge of their source, and without any aim to attach a meaning. Thus the earliest British coins have often on one side an ill-formed and disjointed horse, and on the other, an equally misshapen human head, laureated, but of which the wreath, or the curls of hair, only remain; some are stamped, on one side only, with a grotesque horse; others have symbols and ornaments of various kinds, such as wheels, flowers, and animals, many of which are evidently
