never found a single exception to their divisibility into so many half pennyweights. It would thus appear that the ancient Celtic scale was the same with that which we now call troy weight. Sir William conjectures that the Latin uncia, an ounce, is the Celtic word itnsha, which he says signifies one-sixth; in which case we must suppose the original integral weight of which the ounce was a fraction to have been half our present pound troy. "To what remote period of antiquity," he observes, "do these singular facts carry us back! To many ages before the time of Cæsar, or even Herodotus. The latter speaks of the Lydians as the first who coined metallic money, at least six centuries before our era. These are no visionary speculations; we have here the remains and imperishable relics of those early times to verify the whole; and recent investigations and discoveries, in a most singularly convincing manner, come to our aid, by showing that the fresco paintings in the tombs of Egypt exhibit people bringing, as tribute to the foot of the throne of Pharaoh, bags of gold and silver rings, at a period before the exodus of the Israelites." These rings, however, are not the only specimens that have been found of the substitutes used by the Britons before the introduction of coined money. Both in barrows and elsewhere there have been occasionally turned up hoards of what has all the appearance of being another species of primitive currency, consisting of small plates of iron, mostly thin and ragged, and without any impression.
Of British coined money the description which is apparently of greatest antiquity is that of which the specimens present only certain pictorial figures, without any legends or literal characters. Of this sort of coins a considerable collection was discovered about the middle of the last century, on the top of Carnbre Hill, in Cornwall. Of these, some were stamped with figures of horses, oxen, hogs, and sheep; a few had such figures of animals on one side, and a head apparently of a royal personage on the other. All of them were of gold; and perhaps it was only money made of the more precious metals which it was thought necessary at first to take the
