The coins of the British Prince Cunobelin were not only stamped with the figures of animals, but with the word TASCIO, which signified TASK, TAX, and TRIBUTE. The payment of them into the Exchequer acquitted the subject of duties on merchandise, and was also a commutation of personal services. “I have thought,” says the learned Camden, “that in old time there was a certain sort of money coined on purpose for this use, seeing, in Scripture, it is called tribute-money; and I am the more confirmed in this opinion, because, in some of the British pieces, there is the Mint-master stamping the money with TASCIO, which among the Britons meant the tribute-money.”
The First Lottery.
The first Lottery in England of which we have any account, took place in 1569, the proposals for which were published in 1567 and 1568. It consisted of 10,000 lots of ten shillings each: there were no blanks, and the prizes consisted chiefly of plate. There were then only three lottery-offices in London. The lottery was drawn at the west door of St. Paul’s Cathedral; and the profits were intended for the repair of the havens of the kingdom, and other public works. M. Greillier considers this number of lots much underrated, and raises them to 400,000; and he arrives at that conclusion because the drawing was continued uninterruptedly both day and night, between the 11th of January and the 6th of May. The first Lottery for sums of money took place in 1630.
Coinage of a Sovereign.
The number of operations necessary for the conversion of an ingot of Gold into Sovereigns is greater than most persons are aware of. In the first instance it is melted; in the second it is cast into bars; in the third the bars are rolled; in the fourth they are cut into short lengths; in the fifth they are annealed in copper pans; in the sixth they are flattened into fillets; in the seventh the fillets are adjusted; in the eighth they are punched, and blanks produced; in the ninth the blanks are weighed singly by automaton balances; in the tenth the blanks are marked, or have their edges raised; in the eleventh they are annealed in cast-iron pans; in the twelfth they are blanched in an acid bath; in the thirteenth they are washed in cold water; in the fourteenth they are dried in hot beech-wood saw-dust; in the fifteenth they are muffled; and in the sixteenth stamped on both sides, milled on their edges, and made perfect for circulation! Thus sixteen operations, separate and distinct from each other, have to be performed in the production of sovereigns from an ingot. But the ingot will be after all only partly converted; the perforated “fillets,” amounting in weight to nearly half that of the original ingot, must be returned to the crucible, recast into bars, and these bars passed through the routine processes above enumerated. The fillets resulting from this second crop of sovereigns will again have to be melted, and yet again and again, if the ingot is to be made to yield all its value in coin; and thus the sixteen operations will be multiplied before the last sovereign is obtained from the precious wedge of gold.—Mechanics’ Magazine.
Wear and Tear of the Coinage.
It has been discovered by the Mint authorities that the intelligent or intelligible life of coins is much shorter than it was prior to the introduction of the railway system and cheap travelling. People move about now more frequently than they used, and so does money. Whether the former wear out sooner from their greater activity is a problem for social economists, but that the latter does is certain. Towards the close of the last century careful experiments deduced the fact that deterioration among ten-year-old silver coins of the various denominations was as follows:—Crowns, 3½ per cent.; half-crowns, 10 per cent.; shillings, 24½ per cent.; and sixpences, 38 2-10ths per cent. Now, the loss is nearly as follows on coins of the same age:—Crowns, 5 per cent.; half-crowns, 12 per cent.; shillings, 30 per cent.; sixpences, 45 per cent.; and threepences, over fifty per cent. This increase is evidently due to “fast living,” so to speak, and the weakest individuals; or, at any rate, the smallest, suffer most from its consequences. The gold coinage does not deteriorate in anything like the same ratio, and this from obvious causes. It is not subjected to anything like the same course of treatment. It moves in higher and more circumscribed circles, is only a legal tender when of legal weight, and is therefore nursed with more care under the porte-monnaie system. Of copper and bronze moneys, pence and halfpence suffer the most rapid deterioration, farthings being the longest lived of the three denominations. They are all tokens of value merely, and their shortcomings are less noticed, and, indeed, of far less consequence to the public.—Mechanics’ Magazine.
Counterfeit Coin.
There is little doubt that the method first employed in the manufacture of money was that of pouring fluid bullion into earthen moulds previously impressed by some rude artist with the device intended to be represented on the coin; and that (as now in some remote localities of Central India) a small cylindrical vessel, forming a smelting-furnace, a pair of tongs, a cutting-tool or file, and a pair of scales, constituted the entire apparatus for a mint. It is not a little singular that the casting process is that resorted to by counterfeiters up to this day. The customary mode adopted for the production of spurious money at present is precisely identical, indeed, with that employed in the manufacture of genuine coin by the monarchs and the moneyers—as the fabricators of money were then termed—of the Heptarchy, only that the coiners of to-day use appliances superior to those of the tenth century. A private coiner of the nineteenth century, whether in Birmingham or London, expends very little in the purchase of his plant of machinery. He provides himself with a pennyworth of plaster of Paris, which he converts into a mould; making a genuine coin serve as the medium for impressing the material when in a soft state with the devices—the obverse and reverse. If he cannot steal pint measures from a publican, he will have to invest a portion of his capital in Britannia-metal spoons at a shilling a dozen, and these he will break up and melt in an earthen pipkin, purchasable for another penny. With a tobacco-pipe for a ladle he will take up sufficient of the fused metal to create a florin, say, and this he will pour into the moulds. As soon as these are filled, and the base compound has become solidified, the moulds are separated, and any defects observable in the graining or milling of the edge are made good with a file or some other implement adapted to the nefarious purpose. If, after this, a clever confederate can finish the work by depositing a coat of silver (by galvanic agency), so much the better for the manufacturer, his chance of uttering being thus much enhanced.—Mechanics’ Magazine.