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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.

From the nature of this work, a certain amount of polemic was inevitable; but I trust that not a line will be found which contains anything which could be offensive to the living, or is disrespectful to great scholars now no more. I owe so much to the works of distinguished men, from whose principles I am obliged to dissent, that I feel myself almost an ingrate who assails his benefactors with the very means provided for him by their labours.

It now only remains for me to thank many friends, who have aided me and taken an interest in this work.

To Mr J. G. Frazer, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, I am under obligations which I cannot adequately express in words. He has read through the proofs of the whole of this work, and there is scarcely a page which has not benefited from his most careful and acute criticism. Besides this his vast knowledge of the manners and customs of barbarous peoples has furnished me with many most valuable references, and his fine Ethnological Library has been ungrudgingly placed at my disposal. Professor W. Robertson Smith has read the proofs of those pages which deal with Semitic systems, and Prof. J. H. Middleton those treating of the Greek.

By their kind sacrifice of time and labour which have been robbed from important works of their own, the many shortcomings of this book have been rendered far less numerous than they otherwise would be, but of course I alone am responsible for the manifold ones which remain.

I must also express my gratitude to Mr Head, Mr Wroth and Mr Grueber of the Coin Department of the British Museum for their kindness and courtesy in affording me every facility for studying the coins under their charge.

I have to thank the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press for having undertaken the publication of this work.

Queen’s College, Cork,

Christmas Eve, 1891.