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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 3061219, member: 19463&quot;]I believe this is a subject that would be of great interest to many, many people but next to impossible to ascertain with any accuracy.&nbsp; I am not talking about just Otho but any coins both by ruler and by specific, exact variety.&nbsp; My current interest of note is Roman Alexandria where we have recent references like Emmett that give rarity estimates (5 being one or two?) and older lists like Dattari that show images of what seems to be a large number of coins not matched by another example.&nbsp; Just how does one expect to take a census of what exists?&nbsp; Counts like the RIC rarity ratings based on sampling a fixed set of collections certainly prove inadequate.&nbsp; No one knows just how many people collect or have old family collections not seen for decades.&nbsp; How can we know what is in the buckets when we have no idea how many buckets there are?&nbsp; Certainly one can tally sales in &#039;name&#039; auctions making the assumption that coins worth counting would be likely to be sold there but ignoring museum basements and private holdings with less than ideal cataloging.&nbsp; I have doubts of how any census could be valid within reason when the counts are low.&nbsp; There is also the question of how many coins known to have existed a century ago still actually exist.&nbsp; Wars, thefts followed by melting and bronze disease happen.&nbsp; Proving something existed is easy; proving it does not exist is not.</p><p><br /></p><p>3800 Otho&#039;s?&nbsp; 80-100 EID MAR&#039;s?&nbsp; A thousand different coins sold as &#039;Unique&#039;?&nbsp;&nbsp; On what do we base such statistics that elevate the numbers above wild guess status?[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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