of the late James Thorburn, Barrister-at-Law, and Mary Anne, daughter of William Stewart, of Shambellie, Dumfries, with which district his family has been connected for several generations. He was born in 1838, and was educated at Dumfries and Edinburgh. In 1858 he entered the army as ensign in the 1st Royal Scots, and after serving in India and elsewhere for some years he joined the Army Pay Department, in which he gained considerable financial experience. He subsequently again served in India and in other parts of the world, rising through the various grades in his profession until, in March, 1886, he attained the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, and was selected for the onerous and responsible post of Chief Paymaster in Ireland. He was not, however, destined long to hold this office, as in August last he was suddenly struck down by the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs, and after a painful illness of ten weeks he died on October 18th, 1886, at Dalkey, near Dublin, at the age of forty-eight years. He is interred at Malvern, Worcestershire, by the side of his only son, who died in the previous year, aged fifteen.

Colonel Thorburn's taste for coins was developed while still at school, a friend having presented him with some Scottish coins that had long been treasured in his family. During the whole of his military career he never lost sight of his favourite study, and his collection, acquired by degrees, comprised a considerable number of scarce coins and was especially rich in those of the Stuart period. Numerous references to coins in the Thorburn collection will be found in Kenyon's Gold Coins of England. The work by which Colonel Thorburn is best known is a Guide to the Coins of Great Britain and Ireland-with their value-published in 1884, of which a short notice appeared in the Numismatic Chronicle. On this work he bestowed the leisure hours of some years and I believe that he was contemplating another and a larger work when his active and useful career was cut short by an untimely death.

Mr. William Brice had long been known as a most diligent

and judicious collector of coins. So long ago as January, 1850, he became a member of this Society, but he shortly afterwards resigned, and did not rejoin our body until February, 1886. His family has for many years been settled in Bristol, in which city Mr. Brice long practised as a solicitor, and of which for a few years he was the Town Clerk. Shortly after his retirelong legal services were

ment from active work in 1880, his fittingly acknowledged by his being placed on the roll of magistrates for the county of Gloucester. Although so skilled a numismatist, he did not write upon the subject of coins, though he was ever ready to help others with information; and Mr. Montagu, when writing on the copper coinage of Great Britain, based many observations on the coins in Mr. Brice's collection, which,—I am divulging no secret in saying it,-have now passed into his own. Mr. Brice was never married, and died after a very short illness on March 14th last, having nearly completed his seventy-fifth year.

The Baron Lucien de Hirsch de Gereuth,3 of Paris, was born at Brussels in 1856, and became a member of this Society in April, 1884, having in November, 1883, communicated to us an important paper on some rare and inedited Sicilian coins from his own collection. His numismatic tastes dated from a visit to Constantinople in 1869, where he was much struck by the Prokesch-Osten collection. A few years afterwards he began to collect on his own account, and his series of Greek coins, which though limited in extent was of great beauty, comprising some of the finest works of art of the ancient die engravers, was exhibited in the Trocadéro in Paris in 1878. The coins of Sicily formed the chief part of his collection, and on these he could speak with authority. A posthumous memoir by the Baron L. de Hirsch on the coins of Orontobates or Rhoonto

3 A more extended memoir will be found in the Rev. Num.

• Numismatic Chronicle, 3rd Series, vol. iii., p. 165.

5 Ann de Num., vol. v., p. 204.

e

pates has just appeared in the Revue Numismatique, 1887, p. 89.

Mr. James Gibbs, who for some years was a member of the Council of the Supreme Government of India, joined this Society in May, 1880, and communicated several papers to our Journal. The first of these was on the Gold and Silver Coins of the Bahman Dynasty which ruled over the Deccan for a term of a century and a half, but of whose history and coinage but little had previously been published. A second important paper on some rare and unpublished coins of the Pathan and Mogul Dynasties of Delhi was published in 1885, and forms a necessary supplement to the works of Marsden and Thomas. Sir Walter Elliot, another distinguished Oriental numismatist and author of the work On the Coins of Southern India in the International Marsden, has also passed away. He was, however, I believe, at no time a member of this Society.

Among the more important numismatic works published in this country during the past year I must place first the Historia Numorum, by our excellent Secretary, Mr. Head, which has been issued by the Oxford University Press. It is rightly described on its title page as a Manual of Greek Numismatics, and I think that it may fairly claim for itself the distinction of being the most complete manual of the kind that has hitherto appeared in any language. Numismatic science like all other sciences is cumulative, and in addition to being able to benefit by the studies of our predecessors, and as it were to stand on their shoulders when searching after knowledge, we of the present day have the advantage of more widely spread general knowledge of archæological subjects and of more scientific methods for their investigation. On the metric systems of antiquity, on their extension and diffusion from various centres, on the chronological classification of coins by means of their style, and indeed on most subjects connected with Greek numismatics, Mr. Head has long been able to speak with the authority of mature experience. It is I think sixty years since

the complete publication of the Doctrina Numorum Veterum of Eckhel, and nearly ninety since his death, and the Historia Numorum of Mr. Head is the only comprehensive work of the same kind which has since been given to the world. A comparison of the two works will show how enormously our knowledge, at all events in some departments, has extended in this interval of time. For instance, as I have already observed, not a single Cyzicene was known to Eckhel, and of the coinage of Elis, Corinth, Phocæa, and Attica his knowledge was incomplete and his attributions not unfrequently erroneous, while the Lycian and Cypriote characters, towards the interpretation of which so much has now been accomplished, were practically unknown to him. None of us are infallible, and probably some few corrections will eventually be made in Mr. Head's chronology of the coinages and possibly in their attribution; but as a whole I venture to predict that his manual will long remain the standard work on the Greek coinage, and n the name of the Society I beg to offer him our congratulations on the completion of his arduous task, and our thanks for the assistance he has rendered to our science.

Professor Percy Gardner has during the past year added another volume to the valuable series of Catalogues of Greek Coins in the British Museum. It relates to the coins of Peloponnesus, excluding those of Corinth, which will appear in a subsequent volume, and in addition to the mere catalogue contains an important preliminary essay on the monetary standards in Peloponnesus, as well as on the types, chronology, and origin of the coinage in the various states comprised in that peninsula.

Students of English numismatics will gladly hail the first volume of the Catalogue of English Coins in the British Museum, which relates to the earlier portion of the Anglo-Saxon Series and has been carefully compiled by Mr. Keary. To this volume also an excellent introductory chapter has been appended, and autotype plates are given of all the principal coins. As might

pleasure. The work lays claim to be little more than an accurate catalogue, though I have also sought to make it useful to those not deeply acquainted with Hellenic mythology and its various cults, by some illustrative matter in connection with the different types.

Of this remarkable and large series of coins, Eckhel, as I shall have occasion to mention again, knew nothing. The first account of them was given by Sestini in his Stateri antichi, published in 1817, where figures of several staters and parts of the stater are given, not, however, very correctly. The next account is one by M. Charles Lenormant, Essai sur les Statères de Cyzique, in the first volume of the new series of the Revue Numismatique, in 1856, followed in 1864 by a paper by his son M. François Lenormant, Statères inédits de Cyzique, in the ninth volume of that periodical. The same learned author has also given an account of the coins of Cyzicus in Dictionnaire des Antiquités of Daremberg and Saglio. Though I am unable to agree with these eminent authors in some of their views, I feel myself under great obligations to them for much information and many suggestions. Two most valuable papers by Mr. B. V. Head have appeared in the Numismatic Chronicle, new series, vols. xvi. and xvii., "On a recent find of Staters of Cyzicus," and "Additional Notes," &c., the latter being accompanied by a letter from M. Six containing many valuable remarks on some of the staters described in Mr. Head's first paper. Several scattered notices of one or more of these coins have been given by De Koehne, Mr. Borrell, Dr. Imhoof-Blumer, and Herr Löbbecke in various serials.

It remains to mention Marquardt's very complete work, Cyzicus und sein Gebiet, published in 1836. Though a small space only is devoted to the electrum coinage-indeed at