Ebook American Colonial History

The accompanying descriptions of Medals illustrating American Colonial History, were compiled by my brother, C. Wyllys Betts, of New York, whose death, in 1887, in the early maturity of an active and useful life, put an end to labors in more than one line of interesting research.

The value of coins and Medals, as enduring records of events, has often been emphasized. All original documents and contemporary accounts of occurrences are of peculiar importance to the conscientious historian. Medals are original documents in metal. In studying them we study history at its source. As contributions to the knowledge of the history of portraiture, dress and habits, as indices of then existing information in architecture, geography and the natural sciences, and as means of restoring the knowledge of structures long destroyed, Medals are not to be under-estimated. Medals are a "body of history," or, perhaps, a "collection of pictures in miniature," or "so many maps for explaining ancient geography." One is to look upon a cabinet of Medals as a treasure, not of money, but of knowledge," and "as the means by which a conqueror has sometimes 'discharged a debt to posterity, after he has ruined or defaced a strong place, by delivering a model of it, as it stood whole and tire, so as in some measure to repair the mischiefs of his bombs and cannon.'