These letters in the Dundee press from old townsmen and friends of Mr. Chalmers, personally unknown to me as I was to them (I having left Dundee while a youth, over fifty years ago, and passed much of the interval abroad), with the consequent attention drawn to the subject, naturally called upon me to make an endeavour to vindicate my father's claim to the merit of such an important feature in the success of the Penny Postage scheme as was, and is, the adhesive stamp. These letters, moreover, acquainted me with what I was previously unaware of--that on the 1st January, 1846, a public testimonial had been presented in the Town Hall of Dundee to Mr. Chalmers, in recognition of his postal services, and of his having been the originator of the adhesive postage stamp; thus all the more calling upon me to investigate a subject of which hitherto I had only a dim and partial idea. This investigation was further facilitated by my withdrawal just before the same period of 1879 from active business, thus enabling me to examine at the library of the British Museum the papers, documents, speeches, and motions in Parliament, Reports of Parliamentary Committees, and all such evidence and information tending to throw light upon, from the year 1832 onwards, the history and events preceding the reformed system of postage introduced to the public in the year 1837 by the then Mr. Rowland Hill. My father long since dead (while I was abroad), and his establishment long ago broken up, difficulty was at first experienced in obtaining the specific evidence necessary to enable me to establish my claim on his behalf, but the attention publicly drawn to the matter by former publications of my own, and of Mr. Pearson Hill to which I was called upon to reply, brought forward ever-increasing evidence of the most conclusive nature, and to which I am now enabled to add material and interesting confirmation from papers left by the late Sir Henry Cole, whose connection with the Penny Postage Reform of 1837-40 is well known. THE PENNY POSTAGE SCHEME OF SIR ROWLAND HILL NOT ORIGINAL. My business, of course, in the investigation just named, was to ascertain what plan Sir Rowland Hill had proposed in his pamphlet of 1837 for the purpose of carrying out his Penny Postage Scheme, and to trace therefrom the adoption on his part of my father's plan of the adhesive stamp. But a discovery of much more historical importance before long presented itself, namely, that neither the conception of uniform penny postage itself, nor of any one of the valuable principles and figures of the penny postage scheme, were original conceptions on the part of Sir Rowland Hill.