the Secretary of State became by law the keeper of the seal, and was not changed till August 3, 1790, when the recital was made to include the year of independence and was countersigned by Thomas Jefferson as Secretary of State. Thus, singularly enough, the abandonment of the term “Great Seal of the United States” began with the Executive some months before it received legal sanction. VI THE ILLEGAL SEAL In ancient times a seal to authenticate a document was always impressed upon wax, or metal, or even upon clay; but this gave place to the more convenient method of impressing the seal directly upon the paper by the use of two faces of a die. It was, presumably, a desire to introduce this improvement which prompted the Department of State in 1841 to discard the seal of 1782 and have a new die cut. The work was ordered without any specific appropriation being made for the purpose by Congress, and was entrusted to Edward Stabler, of Sandy Spring, Md., where he was postmaster from 1828 to 1883, who cut many government seals, and had a reputation as a seal engraver. He was doubtless permitted to design the seal in his own way, and it was accepted without notice being taken of its palpable deficiencies from an artistic and heraldic point of view and its failure to satisfy the plain requirements of the law in the important particular of the number of arrows in the eagle’s sinister talon. In reply to a letter from John D. Champlin, jr., in 1877, the Department of State said of the seal: This change [from the design of the seal of 1782] does not appear to have been authorized by law, and the cause of it is unknown.[30] The inaccuracies of the design of the arms on this seal were the subject of grave criticism from time to time. In the Galaxy Magazine for May, 1877, Mr. Champlin pointed out the improper arrangement of the pales, the red being twice as wide as the white, and the fatal disregard of the law requiring thirteen arrows in the eagle’s sinister talon. “Is it possible,” he said, “that an arbitrary alteration can be made in the great seal of the United States by the officials temporarily in charge of it? And if so, what is to prevent some future Secretary of State, with notions of his own in regard to heraldic bearings, from discarding the old seal altogether, in favor of some creation of his own?”