CATALOGUER'S NOTE.

It is perhaps unnecessary for the writer to state that the foregoing catalogue makes no pretensions to illustrate the splendid methods of the cataloguer's art as it is now developed. A cursory examination of the contents of the collection will readily reveal its exceedingly fragmentary condition-a fact which made it seem necessary to adopt special schemes of arrangement of the coins, which would not have been considered had the collection been more fully representative. To render the actual contents of the collection easily accessible has been the main object, steadily kept in view when departing from the well-known methods of arrangement of the coins of the countries of the Western Hemisphere. Part II is to serve primarily as a check-list for official uses, a fact which will explain the otherwise apparently unnecessary publication of those coins.

The collectors of the coins of the United States, especially those who have much regard for minute variations in the dies with the same types, will have reason to feel some disappointment, not only because of the numerous and wide lacunæ in the collection, but also because of the omission, in some instances, to mention the slight variations in the specimens that are in the collection; but here the official advice, to note only real varieties—that is, the varieties that originated in an intentional change in the type-is doubtless wise; while the lack of specimens of the large number of industriously determined die varieties would in many cases have compelled resort to explanations of some length, if the facts were to be made clear to others than expert collectors, and such explanations would have encumbered and certainly impaired the value of the work. For such "varieties" are chiefly evidence of unskillful or slovenly workmanship at the mint; they have but little if any bearing upon the history of the

coinage, and concern for the most part the collectors of coins, whose interests in that particular are already served by a number of well-known publications, which the specimens in the mint collection in nowise supplement.

Few men can lay claim to expert knowledge of the coinages of the world, ancient and modern-probably none would do so and certainly the writer does not claim a tithe of the whole field, yet it has fallen to his lot to prepare this catalogue, in which coinages of nearly the entire world are represented, and to do so within a rather brief space of time, without special preparation and without the benefit of any advice of specialists in the various fields and often with inadequate literary aids. That errors are to be found in the volume is to be expected; yet if the work, in addition to being a published record of the contents of the collection, as desired, should also in a measure serve the purposes of students and persons interested in the subject the utmost hopes of the writer will be realized.