to the great father of medicine to come and heal them of the
plague. The migration of the Phocian colony to Asia Minor is succinctly
told in the [Greek: phoche], or seal, which followed the early Mayflower
stamped upon one of the earliest of the Grecian coins. The late coins of
the Grecian series, with the portraits of Alexander, Ptolemy, Seleucus,
Lysimachus, and others, have lent to the historian a fresh and life-like
picture of those stern days, and have been silent but incontrovertible
witnesses of the truth of the records which have come down to us.
Cymbeline, of Shakspeare, dates back to the Cunobelin of an ancient
Saxon coin, struck before Boadicea's time. Who would have known of the
Grecian domination in Bactria, long after Alexander's time, but for a
casual traveller who found the fact, together with a lost language, upon
a series of coins unearthed in that part of Asia? The coins of Alexander
fix the capture of Egypt; those of Vespasian, the capture of Judea; and
those of Trajan, the capture of Parthia. They were the 'brief
chroniclers of the time'--Stantonian bulletins, announcing each fresh
conquest.

The coins of the ancient day--for our modern productions can hardly
claim the credit--blend artistic grace and beauty. Upon them art made
its first and some of its best essays. A cabinet of Grecian and Roman
coins is a compact history of art from its inception to its meridian in
the culmination of Grecian splendor--and since that time, if we may
believe Ruskin, we only approximate, or what is worse, degrade. The
gradual decline of art and the decay of the empire are traceable on the
Roman series. You may follow the downward steps, until it becomes nearly
extinct, to revive, after a period of stagnation, in a new feeling in
the quaint but strong and rugged Gothic, the beautiful development of
which may be seen in the coinage of modern Europe from the fifth to the
fifteenth century. The Farnesian Hercules, the Venus de' Medici, the
Apollo Belvidere, and the famous equestrian Marcus Aurelius make their
appearance upon the ancient medals. Undoubtedly many of the magnificent
designs of Grecian medals in particular are but the types of Protogenes
and Apelles, as Houdin's model cast of Washington has been photographed,
as it were, upon the Wright medal. The grand Byzantine school of art is
nowhere better brought out than on the coins of that period. The
details of Constantine's coins are found in the ivory dyptics and