you will find a detailed account of my transactions with the Stamp Office, and on which my present claims are based. The following is a verbatim copy of that letter:--

THE REWARD OF INVENTION.
To the Editor of The Times.

SIR,

The letter which you favoured me by publishing last week in relation to the refusal of our Government to allow the Grand Cross to be accepted by our countrymen, has elicited many kindly and sympathising expressions from private correspondents; but to the mind of one gentleman I appear to have written "with some bitterness." Now, I may plead guilty to such feeling whenever my memory is driven back by force of circumstances to a period when the Government of this country inflicted on me a great and grievous injustice in exchange for a great and permanent benefit conferred by me on the State.

Perhaps nothing would tend so much to dispel this morbid feeling as a brief recital of the circumstances to which I refer.

The facts are briefly these:-- At the age of seventeen, I came to London from a small country village, knowing no one, and myself unknown, a mere cypher in this vast sea of human enterprise. My studious habits and love of invention soon gained for me a footing, and at twenty I found myself pursuing a mode I had invented of taking copies from antique and modem basso-relievos in a manner that enabled me to stamp them on cardboard, thus producing thousands of embossed copies of the highest works of art at a small cost. The facility with which I could make a permanent die, even from a thin paper original, capable of producing a thousand copies, would have opened a wide door to successful fraud if my process had been known to unscrupulous persons; for there is not a Government stamp or the paper seal of any corporate body that every common office-clerk could not forge in a few minutes at the office of his employer or at his own home. The production of a die from a common paper stamp is the work of only ten minutes; the materials cost less than a penny. No sort of technical skill is necessary, and a common copying-press or letter-stamp yields most successful copies. There is no need for the would-be forger to associate himself with a skilful die-sinker capable of making a good imitation in steel of the original, for the merest tyro could make an absolute copy on the first attempt. The public knowledge of such a means of forging would, at that time, have shattered the whole system of the British Stamp Office, had I been so incautious as to allow a knowledge of my method to escape. The secret has, however, been carefully guarded to this day.

No sooner, however, had this fact dawned on me than I began to consider if some new sort of stamp could be devised to prevent so serious a mischief. During the time I was engaged in studying this question, I was informed that the Government were themselves cognisant of the fact that they were losers to a great amount annually by the transfer of stamps from old and useless deeds to new skins of parchment, thus making the stamps do duty a second or third time, to the serious loss of the Revenue. At a later date, this fact was confirmed by Sir Charles Presley, of the Stamp Office, who told me that he believed they were defrauded in this way to the extent of probably £100,000 per annum. To fully appreciate the importance of this fact, and realise the facility afforded for this species of fraud by the system then in use, it must be understood that the ordinary impressed or embossed stamp, such as is employed on all bills of exchange, if impressed directly on a skin of parchment, would be entirely obliterated if the deed be exposed for a few months to a damp atmosphere. The deed would thus appear as if unstamped, and therefore invalid. To prevent this, it has been the practice as far back as the reign of Queen Anne, to gum a small piece of blue paper on to the parchment; and to render it still more secure a strip of metal foil is passed through it, and another piece of paper with the printed initials of the Sovereign is gummed over the loose ends of the foil at the back. The stamp is then impressed on the blue paper, which, unlike parchment, is incapable of losing the impression by exposure to a damp atmosphere. But, practically, it has been found that a little piece of moistened blotting-paper applied for a whole night so softens the gum that the two pieces of paper and the slip of foil can be removed from the old deed most easily and applied to a new skin of parchment, and thus be made to do duty a second or third time. Thus the