Pius, and the mother of the wife of his successor Marcus Aurelius. Faustina, who was noted for her beauty, but whose character was none of the best, died A.D. 141, about the time of the completion of the Great Wall erected by her husband between the Firths of Forth and Clyde — commonly called the Wall of Antoninus - and this coin, struck in her honour in the first half of the second century, was doubtless dropped by one of the soldiers of the British Legion on the way from the camp at Inveresk to one or other of the many stations on the Wall. Strange it is that through all these seventeen centuries the kindly soil should have preserved for us the features of this fair but faithless Roman beauty.
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In the year 1778, in digging for marl in Duddingston Loch, a large heap of warlike weapons was discovered — swords, spear heads of plain and ornamental patterns, rings and staples, and "lumps of brass.” From the fact that the lumps of brass” seemed as if half melted, and that gigantic deers’ horns, and fragments of others were discovered along with the weapons and masses of melted bronze, it has been conjectured, with some probability, that a considerable manufactory of bronze weapons had been carried on at some remote period on the margin of the loch. Some of the most perfect and beautiful, of these weapons are now in the Abbotsford Museum, and about fifty pieces of swords, spear heads, and other fragments of weapons, most of them more or less affected by fire, are in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries in Edinburgh. The swords, as will be observed from the above illustrations, are of the leaf-shaped form, with perforated handles, to which bone or wood had been attached. Some of the large spear heads have been pierced with a variety of ornamental perforations. During the construction of the Queen's Drive in 1846, almost directly above the Loch two most beautiful and perfect leaf-shaped bronze swords were dug up in a bed of vegetable charcoal, and they are now in the Museum. The bronze spear heads present a great variety of forms of ornamental devices. The Scottish bronze dagger of the same period is almost invariably found to consist of a two-edged blade, tapering
