Lot 150 was the 1/2 T. Naples, arms type, bought in for 40s., and the cross type was bought in for 9s. Lot 160 was "a remarkably good 13 cent of the commoner type of the 1852 figure Sandwich Islands, which the owner boldly started at £6 and bought in for an additional ten shillings, a very full price indeed." Nevertheless it would have cost £90 or more to-day.

The record of this sale deserves more attention than I am able to give it here: the event was certainly one of extraordinary interest, though it was considered at the time something of a failure, and was not repeated. The next auction sale of stamps did not take place until sixteen years later. But I must spare a few lines for my chronicler's peroration.

"The results of this sale are so far satisfactory that they prove that Philately is not yet on the wane, and never will be. It is a young science, but before many years pass, we shall regard £5 for a valuable stamp as calmly as we do now the pound sterling for an ordinary specimen; and those who have been the mainstays of the dealers will undoubtedly find that their outlays, however extensive, will produce at least cent. per cent. What are we to think of the matchless collections of Mr. Philbrick, Sir Daniel Cooper, Mr. Atlee, Baron Arthur de Rothschild, E. J., and others, gathered together with unflagging toil and patience, but all of which contain practically unattainable things? And will not these in the course of years inevitably become of fabulous value?"

Four years after the Cooper collection was sold for £3,000, Mr. Philbrick, to the deep regret of all his British colleagues, sold his general collection (not the Great Britain portion) to M. la Rénotière in Paris, for the then record price of £8,000. At his death, which occurred so recently as Christmas, 1910, it would have represented the comfortable fortune of, say, £50,000! It would be a shorter task to say what was not in this truly wonderful collection than to attempt a list of its gems, for the absentees were almost nil. The best idea of the strength of this collection must be gathered from the valuable papers Philbrick contributed to The Stamp Collector's Magazine and The Philatelic Record, chiefly under the pseudonyms "Damus petimusque vicissim," "An Amateur," and several "By the author of the 'Postage Stamps of British Guiana,'" and by his collaborated work with the late Mr. W. A. S. Westoby, "The Postage and Telegraph Stamps of Great Britain." Here I may fittingly place on record a souvenir I recently acquired of this collaboration and close friendship between these two most renowned of the students of stamps, whose work is a classic in the literature of Philately, and is still constantly referred to, being only in some respects superseded by later authorities. The letter itself amply justifies publication in entirety here, as it throws an interesting light on the philatelic evidence before the Joint Committee on Postage Stamps appointed by the Postmaster-General, the "confidential" report of which was printed in 1885 ("Bibl. Lindesiana," p. 159).

"11, Earl's Avenue, Folkestone,
"December 29th.

"My Dear Philbrick,—

"After seeing you on Saturday I wrote a letter to Mr. Jeffery saying that you had told me the substance of what passed, and that I most thoroughly endorsed what you had said about forgery. It was not the difficulty of forging a stamp which constituted their protection, so much as the difficulty of disposing of the stamps when forged.

"I further said that if they determined on having a surface printed series not combined with embossing they must allow me to point out what I considered to be a fatal error in all Messrs. De La Rue's designs, and this was the introduction of a lined background, the lines of which were almost coincident with the lines of shading in the head. The merit of Bacon's design was that he had a light head thrown up by a dark background, and I could scarcely point out an instance where surface-printed stamps had not either a solid background or none at all, like the Hungarian of 1872. As they would possibly not like a solid background I suggested to them to adopt a standard profile of the Queen's head, and for all the stamps up to 1s. to reduce it by photography to the size of the head on the 2d., and for those above they might reduce it to a larger size, so as to keep the same likeness through all, and to put it on a plain white ground, and I sent them a 2d. from which I had removed the lined background like as I have done in the 1d. annexed.

"That if they would excuse my making a further suggestion it would be that for all the stamps up to 1s. about four colours would suffice, if the framings were made different and distinctly visible, ... thus:—

Green{½d.pink like the present 5s.{1d.blue like the 2s.{olive{6d.
1½d.2d.2½d.9d.
3d.4d.5d.1s.