THE COIN COLLECTOR - World eBook Library

INTRODUCTORY
The numismatic products of every part of Europe
exhibit their own peculiar features of interest and
claims to attention ; but a careful and leisurely colla-
tion of one with another shews us more and more how
much in this respect the modems owe to the ancients,
or how little the world has acquired in its riper life
which it had not learned and forgotten in its youth.
In the sort of coiqi-cTceil which our volume affords, that
great lesson is readable in many and many a place.
One of the earliest collectors of coins in England is
saicTto have been Prince Henry^son of James I. But
the pursuit is undoubtedly of great antiquity, and the
Romans are credited with having sought the money of
those nations which preceded them, and notably the
Greeks, in power and in the arts. There was a very
prolonged interval, during the whole of the mediae-
val period and later, when the ancient coinages were
neglected and destroyed ; and even when the taste for
memorials of the past revived, it was at first the medal
rather than the current money which attracted atten-
tion—the medal in the wider sense in which it still
finds acceptance in many languages and systems. The
modern Europeans made amends for their barbarous
predecessors by engaging from the seventeenth century
onward with unbroken continuity in the collection and
study of these inestimable treasures ; and we know how
busy the pickaxe and the spade have been in reclaiming
from the earth in all parts of the world trodden by the
ancients the buried heirlooms of centuries—numismatic
archives, which have in some instances made the writing
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