lessening the long land journey--not less than thirty days--which was
required, as Polybius tells us, to convey it from the Straits of Dover
to the Rhone. (This journey, it may be noted, was made not in wagons,
as through Britain, but on pack-horses.)

D. 5.--Thus it reached Marseilles; and that the trade was founded
by the Massiliot Pytheas is borne testimony to by the early British
coins, which are all modelled on the classical currency of his age.
The medium in universal circulation then, current everywhere, like the
English sovereign now, was the Macedonian stater, newly introduced by
Philip, a gold coin weighing 133 grains, bearing on the one side
the laureated head of Apollo, on the other a figure of Victory in a
chariot. Of this all known Gallic and British coins (before the Roman
era) are more or less accurate copies. The earliest as yet found in
Britain do not date, according to Sir John Evans, our great authority
on this subject,[21] from before the 2nd century B.C. They are all
dished coins, rudely struck, and rapidly growing ruder as time goes
on. The head early becomes a mere congeries of dots and lines, but one
horse of the chariot team remains recognizable to quite the end of the
series.

D. 6.--These coins have been found in very large numbers, and of
various types, according to the locality in which they were struck.
They occur as far north as Edinburgh; but all seem to have been issued
by one or other of the tribes in the south and east of the island, who
learnt the idea of minting from the Gauls. Whence the gold of which
the coins are made came from is a question not yet wholly solved:
surface gold was very probably still obtainable at that date from the
streams of Wales and Cornwall. But it was long before any other metal
was used in the British mints. Not till after the invasion of Julius