subject which Professor Gardner's very valuable work has by no means exhausted.

Much of Mr. Head's Introduction is of far wider interest than even the wide subject of numismatics. Every student of classical learning in any branch will value the list of magistrates and other public officials, the catalogue of games and festivals, and the curiously varied titles applied to persons or cities.

To the art-student the list of coins signed with engravers' names will be specially welcome, though it makes one regret the somewhat narrow limits of time and space within which these signed pieces fall. The truth is, that for the future more time and attention will have to be given to coins by all who take any deep interest in Greek art. As Mr. Head points out, the value of these long series of delicate metal reliefs (as the coins might be called), the dates of which can be fixed with far greater certainty than those of objects of any other class, is unspeakably great to the student of Hellenic sculpture.

Allowing for their minute scale one can hardly over-estimate the archæological value or the beauty of such series as the electrum staters of Cyzicus-so well described by Canon Greenwell in the last number of the Numismatic Chronicle-or the silver didrachms of Tarentum, varying as their subjects do from the noblest heroic designs to the most realistic and yet always graceful genre.

To students of Greek epigraphy Mr. Head's list of Greek letter-forms will be very interesting, and few probably will not be surprised at the varieties of shapes assumed by some of the characters, especially those of the letter B, some of which have no resemblance whatever to the usual type. The legends on the coins of Heraclea present an interesting series, showing the modifications through which the aspirate passed before it was dropped, and its character used to express the eta. First, we have the closed at top and bottom, and then the H, and thirdly, which last character survived as an accent, and is written high up, like the modern rough breathing, in some MSS. of the sixth century A.D.

The survivals of early forms in some cases are very interesting, as, for example, W the Phoenician form of M, formed just as in the earliest Greek inscriptions of Thera (Santorin).

The various ways of differentiating the omicron and omega are curious. Some Greek Islands taking O to be long, and

1 Unfortunately the plates which accompany this paper give but a very imperfect notion of the extraordinary beauty and delicacy of many of these staters.

others making it represent the short O. The later form is also used with opposite meanings at different places.

The classified catalogue of Greek coins, which forms the bulk of this manual, has many points which make it exceptionally useful; the date of each coin, either approximate or exact, is always given, and also, what is so often omitted in numismatic works, its current value.

It is a great advantage to have, as is the case here, the illustrations printed with the text, and perhaps only a somewhat lazy reader will regret the omission of the familiar bar inscribed with the metal in which the piece is struck.

One very valuable feature in this manual is the bibliographical list at the beginning, supplemented throughout the work with references to separate monographs on special types or classes of coins; the insertion of these references must have required a rare amount of painstaking research.

In short, the work is one which will supply what every classical student must feel to have been a very urgent want; and one cannot but feel proud that it is an English numismatist who has provided in so thorougb a way what till now has been lacking, not only in England, but also in every country in Europe.

J. H. MIDDLETON, King's College, Cambridge.

A Catalogue of the English Coins in the British Museum, Anglo-Saxon Series. Vol. I. London: 1887.

Another of the volumes of British Museum Catalogues, edited by Mr. R. Stuart Poole, has recently appeared, and will be hailed with pleasure by all English numismatists. It has been most carefully compiled by Mr. C. F. Keary, and embraces the Saxon coinages of Mercia, Kent, East Anglia, and Northumbria, as well as those of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. Prefixed is an excellent Introduction of nearly one hundred pages, written by Mr. Keary; and appended are no less than thirty autotype Plates of the principal coins. Such a Catalogue serves at once to show the strong and the weak points in our national collection, for the author has given in italics the names of the various moneyers whose pieces are at present absent from the collection and has also mentioned some of the types which are still desiderata. We have here no room to enter into farther details, but the care that has been bestowed in compiling the Catalogue justifies us in recommending all those interested in the Saxon series to lose no time in becoming possessed of a copy.