[165] “In the end there were selected from the whole number of competitors four whose suggestions appeared to evince most ingenuity,” wrote my father. “The reward that had been offered was divided amongst them in equal shares, each receiving £100” (“Life,” i. 388). Sir Henry Cole gives their names as follows:—“Mr Cheverton, Mr C. Whiting, myself, and, I believe, Messrs Perkins, Bacon & Co. After the labour,” he adds, “of reading the two thousand five” (?six) “hundred proposals sent to the Treasury, 'My Lords' obtained from them no other modes of applying the postage stamp than those suggested by Mr Hill himself—stamped covers or half sheets of paper, stamped envelopes, labels or adhesive stamps, and stamps struck on letter-paper itself.”—(“Fifty Years of Public Life,” i. 62, 65, 66.) [166] So profoundly did Rowland Hill feel the importance of this fact that he invariably scouted a suggestion occasionally made in the early days of the postal reform that his own head should appear on at least one of the stamps. The some-time postmaster of New Brunswick, who caused his portrait to adorn a colonial stamp now much sought after by philatelists on account, perhaps, of its rarity, for it was speedily abolished, seems to have been of quite a different frame of mind. [167] This earliest stamp was a far finer and more artistic piece of workmanship than any of its successors; and has only to be compared with the later specimens—say, for example, with King Edward's head on the halfpenny postcards and newspaper bands—to see how sadly we have fallen behind some other nations and our own older methods, at any rate in the art of engraving, or, at least, of engraving as applied to the postage stamp. [168] In the paper drawn up by Rowland Hill, “On the Collection of Postage by Means of Stamps,” and issued by the Mercantile Committee in June 1839, he had recommended that, for convenience' sake, the stamp should be printed on sheets each containing 240, arranged in twenty rows of twelve apiece; and they are so printed to this day. It has been asserted that at first the sheets were printed in strips of twelve stamps each; but there is no truth in the statement. Archer's perforation patent, which makes separation of the adhesives easy, and is therefore a boon to the many of us who are often in a hurry, was not adopted before the mid-'fifties. [169] His father, an American, was the inventor of the once famous air-gun. [170] Fifteen years after the issue of the first stamps, during which time more than 3,000,000,000 had been printed, it was deemed advisable to make a second matrix by transfer from the first. It had become necessary to deepen the graven lines by hand, but the work was so carefully done that the deviation in portraiture was very slight.