In very early days medals afforded a convenient kind of portrait for transmission to distant friends; large numbers of medals, too, were buried under the foundations of buildings erected by a prince or a state, as in our own time coins are placed under the corner-stone of a public edifice. For instance, in the cellar walls of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, built by Pope Paul II, twenty medals of that pope were found. Some bore on the reverse a representation of the palace, others the arms of the pope with the legend: “Has Ædes Condidit.” They were enclosed in an earthenware case that had to be broken in order to release the contents. It is safe to assume that nearly all early medals bearing representations of buildings were cast for like commemorative purposes. It remained for the beginning of the sixteenth century to witness the inauguration of the art of striking medals from engraved dies. In the British Museum there is an example of a medal of Pope Julius II by Francesco Francia the painter, who besides being a painter and a medalist was also a goldsmith and likewise designed the font of italic type for Aldus Manutius the printer. This medal of Pope Julius was probably struck about the year 1506. It and the medals of Benvenuto Cellini in the Museo Nazionali in Florence (which latter medals are perhaps the finest examples of struck medals of the period, though by no means the most artistic) occasionally turn up in public sales. They, of course, command top-notch prices, although a truly fine gold coin from Cellini’s dies, a coin of undoubted authenticity, was purchased in London by the author for two pounds, and from a dealer of international reputation. When Francia and Cellini were engraving their dies the new method was still confined to medals of smaller circumference, for all the larger ones as yet continued to be cast, even down to the end of the sixteenth century; and of course casting is a method in very general use to-day. The modern process of reducing models by means of a clever mechanical instrument enables the medalist to work out the relief without size restrictions, from which the reduced size desired for the medal is finally obtained with absolute fidelity. In fact, modern medals are often produced in various sizes by an ingenious mechanical process, without any loss in effect from the same original. Roty’s medal for the French Alpine Club is such an example.