Concerning the first invention of stamping letters and figures upon coins, and the name of the inventor, it is fruitless to inquire, as the origin of the art is lost in the remoteness of antiquity. “Leaving these uncertainties,” says Pinkerton, in his Essay on Medals, “we know from respectable authorities that the first money coined in Greece was that struck in the island of Ægina, by Phidon king of Argos. His reign is fixed by the Arundelian marbles to an era correspondent to the 885th year before Christ; but whether he derived this art from Lydia or any other source we are not told.” About three hundred years before the birth of Christ, the art of coining, so far as relates to the beauty of the heads impressed, appears to have attained its perfection in Greece;--we may indeed say its perfection generally, for the specimens which were then produced in that country remain unsurpassed by modern art. Under the Roman emperors the art never seems to have attained so high a degree of perfection as it did in Greece; though several of the coins of Hadrian, probably executed by Greek artists, display great beauty of design and execution. The art of coining, with the rest of the ornamental arts, declined with the empire; and, on its final subversion in Italy, the coins of its rulers were scarcely superior to those which were subsequently minted in England, Germany, and France, during the darkest period of the middle ages. The art of coining money, however rude in design and imperfect in its mode of stamping the impression, which was by repeated blows with a hammer, was practised from the twelfth to the sixteenth century in a greater number of places than at present; for many of the more powerful bishops and nobles assumed or extorted the right of coining money as well as the king; and in our own country the archbishops of Canterbury and York, and the bishop of Durham, exercised the right of coinage till the Reformation; and local mints for coining the king’s money were occasionally fixed at Norwich, Chester, York, St. Edmundsbury, Newcastle-on-Tyne, and other places. Independent of those establishments for the coining of _money_, almost every abbey struck its own _jettons_ or counters; which were thin pieces of copper, commonly impressed with a pious legend, and used in _casting up accounts_, but which the general introduction of the numerals now in use, and an improved system of arithmetic, have rendered unnecessary. As such mints were at least as numerous in France and Germany as in our own country, Scheffer, the partner of Faust, when he conceived the idea of casting letters from matrices formed by punches, would have little difficulty in finding a workman to assist him in carrying his plans into execution. “The art of impressing legends on coins,” says Astle in his Account of the Origin and Progress of writing, “is nothing more than the art of printing on medals.” That the art of casting letters in relief, though not