On the other hand, the conductors of “Chambers's Encyclopædia” evidently recognise that a work of reference should be a mine of reliable information, one of their most notable corrections in a later edition of a mistake made in one earlier being that attributing the suppression of garrotting to the infliction on the criminals of corporal punishment—an allegation which, however, often asserted by those outside the legal profession, has more than once been denied by some of the ablest men within it. No notice would have been taken in these pages of this preposterous claim were it not that the two works of reference whose editors or conductors seem to have been only too easily imposed upon have a wide circulation, and that until retraction be made—an invitation to accord which, in at least one case, was refused for apparently a quite frivolous reason—the foolish myth will in all probability be kept alive. The fraud was so clumsily constructed that it was scarcely taken seriously by those who know anything of the real history of the stamps, impressed and adhesive; and surprise might be felt that sane persons should have put even a passing faith in it, but for recollection that—to say nothing of less notorious cases—the once famous Tichborne claimant never lacked believers in his equally egregious and clumsily constructed imposture. How little the Chalmers claimant believed in his own story is shown by his repeated refusal to accept any of the invitations my brother gave him to carry the case into Court. Had the claim been genuine, its truth might then and there have been established beyond hope of refutation. In all probability most of the claimants to invention of the postage stamp—they have, to our knowledge, numbered over a dozen, while the claimants to the entire plan of reform make up at least half that tale—came from the many competitors who, in response to the Treasury's invitation to the public to furnish designs, sent in drawings and written suggestions.[160] What more natural than that, as years went past and old age and weakened memory came on, these persons should gradually persuade themselves and others that not only had they invented the _designs_ they sent up for competition, but also the very _idea_ of employing stamps with which to pay postage? Even in such a strange world as this, it is not likely that _all_ the claimants were wilful impostors.[161]