is to assume that they were in a far lower condition of culture and intelligence than the negroes of West Africa, rather resembling the lowest known tribes of men, such as the aborigines of Australia and the savages of the South American forests. To make such an assumption respecting a race which has shewn such an unrivalled potentiality of progress and development as the Greeks is absurd.
At this point it will be convenient to take a general survey of our results so far. We found in the Homeric Poems a twofold system of currency, the gold Talanton, and the cow or ox, the latter alone being employed to express values: we next found that the Talanton was the equivalent of the cow, the metallic unit being clearly the later in origin, and being based on or equated to the older unit of barter. Through the sacerdotal tradition of Delos we were enabled to fix the value of the Homeric Talanton at 2 gold Attic drachms, or a Daric (135-130 grains Troy). Next came the standards used in historical Greece. (1) The Euboic (135 grains Troy) used for silver in the great Euboic towns, in Corinth, in Athens from the time of Solon, and as a matter of course in the Chalcidian and Corinthian colonies, and employed as the sole unit for gold in all parts of Greece Proper at all periods; (2) the Aeginetic (200-195 grains) employed in Peloponnesus, in Boeotia and Central Greece. We learned that the Euboic standard coincided with the Homeric Talanton, thus finding the Greeks of historical times using the same standard universally for gold which they had employed long before the introduction of the art of coining from Asia, and partly using this same standard for silver, whilst in other states they employed a standard for the latter metal, which was based on the gold unit, simply dividing the amount of silver equivalent to it into ten parts instead of fifteen.
We then put the question, “Is it rational to suppose that the Greeks borrowed in the 7th century B.C. along with the art of coining from Asia a standard which they themselves already long since possessed?”