ed by designers for our mint.

The coins of Athens may have furnished the original for the olive-wreath
so common on American coins. They were issued under the auspices of
Athene, and bore upon the obverse the head of the goddess. The reverse
regularly bore the owl and the olive-bough. These coins were familiarly
called owls, just as we speak of eagles in our currency, and just as the
English talked of angels and crosses in the time of Elizabeth.
Aristophanes jocosely calls the Athenian pieces owls of Laurium, in
allusion to the gold mines there, in which they were hatched.

It would be of interest to trace these heraldic devices through the
intervening ages, and along the devious ways by which they have come
down to the present. This task would lead one far afield in history. In
the hasty glance just now given to the coins of Greece, we have found
material that will help to an understanding of what is impressed upon
the coins of our own country. There would be no less of propriety and
pertinence in asking what significance these symbols have brought to us
from the time they were struck in faith and in awe by the very shrines
of the gods in the temples of Greece. We may say that these symbols have
no significance for us; but centuries hence, when the beginnings of our
government are no longer a memory with the people, historians will
relate with what instructive readiness the founders of our government,
finding these colonies free and independent states, turned to the
colonies and states of Greece for a model upon which to mould a nation;
and they will find in early American coinage full confirmation of this
view. The very same influence was manifested in the architecture of
America for the first half of this century, as many a public edifice,
and even private houses, sufficiently prove.

Before examining any particular coin, it may be worth the while to
notice a few of the more prominent features of our American types. The
most striking of all is the absence of portrait heads. There is good
reason for this. The theory of our government is, that it is but the
collective will of the people. Again, since the invention of printing,
there is longer reason in giving coins a medallic character. This
function of coinage has been perpetuated in Germany. A _Sieges-Thaler_
was struck after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. There were a few
portrait heads of Washington upon coins struck under his administration;
but the practice