From the PREFACE.
The following pages are an attempt to arrive at a knowledge of the origin of Metallic Currency and Weight Standards by the Comparative Method. As both these institutions played a not inconsiderable part in the development of civilization, it seemed worth while to approach the subject from a different point of view from that from which it had been previously studied. Hitherto Numismatists when studying the Origins of Coinage had confined themselves to the materials presented to them in the earliest money of Lydia, Greece and Italy, and on the other hand the Metrologists had almost completely limited their range of observation to the systems of Babylon, Egypt, Greece and Rome. As the Comparative Method has yielded such excellent results in the study of other human institutions, I have endeavoured by its aid to get some new principles which may throw some fresh light on the first beginnings of monetary and weight systems.
The leading principle which I have here endeavoured to establish by the Inductive Method, I had already put forward in a short paper, but there are various other doctrines now published for the first time, such as the origin of the earliest Greek coin types, the origin of the earliest Greek silver coins, of the Greek Obolos, the Sicilian Litra, and Roman As, of the Mina, and its sixty-fold the Talent.
In treating of the Distribution of gold and the priority of its discovery to that of the other metals, I have been led to criticise the principles of the science of Linguistic Palaeontology, which have gained such currency in this country from Schrader's Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryans, and from Dr Isaac Taylor's popular little book, The Origin of the Aryans. I have been led to conclude that Comparative Philology taken alone is a misleading guide in the study of Anthropology.
