but actual identity. The manner of the process
of transferring the "Queen's Head" from
the mother to her progeny is this: A circular
steel die, or "roller," is softened. The dies
go into a powerful pressing machine together
—the hard and soft, the flat aud circular.
The intense pressure transfers the figure to
the "roller" in relief,—which is also
hardened in its turn, and is then in a condition
to transfer, by indentation, the subject to the
printing plates, by another passage through
the press. After this, the flat die is seldom
wanted. The roller assumes its office, and is
used for the "plates."

The plates employed for printing the postage
stamps are fine oblong pieces of steel—
gleaming like the steel mirrors which the
Roman girls used to see themselves in—
(mirrors well adapted to such a stern people.)
Each plate is large enough to have ranged
upon it two hundred and forty penny
"Queen's Heads;"—one pound's worth.
The effect, therefore, is that of a beautiful
mirror, in which you see Her Majesty's
countenance repeated two hundred and forty times
in close lines. The security against forgery lies
in the engine-turning on the "basis" or ground,
on which the head is done; in the great
excellence of Mr. Charles Heath's design;
in the exquisite beauty of its execution, and
in the perfect identity—barring, of course,
the accidents of printing—of every Queen's
Head, one with another. But the chief
advantage of the invention is the power it
confers of rapid production. The number of
postage labels required for the public service
is—casting out Sundays—upwards of one
million a-day; it was nearly three hundred
millions for the three hundred and sixty-five
days of 1851; fifty-two of them being Sundays.
Let us see, then, what labour would have
been required to keep pace with this
prodigious demand, had Mr. Perkins's invention
not been in existence:—It took Mr. Heath
a fortnight's hard work to engrave, on the
original steel die, the profile which is the
progenitor of all the rest. Had there been no
power to transfer that work to other plates
for printing, of course every head must have
been separately engraved by hand on the
printing plates, each at an equal expenditure
of time. What, therefore, occupied originally
a couple of weeks, and which now occupies
no more than a few minutes to manufacture
plates for printing from, would have taken—
how many years? We shall see:—

Since the introduction of cheap postage,
Messrs. Perkins, Bacon, and Petch have
transferred the matrix upon one-hundred
and forty-two plates, each having two
hundred and forty heads upon it; in other words,
the number of single impressions given off
from steel to steel has been thirty-four
thousand and eighty. Every one of these,
but for the transferring process, must have
been engraved laboriously by hand, at the
expense of a fortnight's time. If the
Wandering Jew were an engraver and had
that little order to execute, he could not have
completed it under thirteen hundred and ten
years. Had a Rowland Hill of the time of
Henry the Eighth set him at work in 1542,
he must have been "cutting away" ever since,
and could not have laid down his graver yet.
The thirty-four thousand and eighty heads
which Mr. Perkins's plan has produced on
steel, since 1840, would have occupied the
miniature bayonets of an army of hand-
engravers one hundred and ten strong! Had
it not been, therefore, for the transferring
process, the Government must have employed
the less elegant and coarser appliances of
stereotype plates and letter-press printing, to
produce postage labels at the inordinate rate
per diem at which they are demanded by an
eminently epistolary public.

Then comes the question of cost, to be
computed from the data of upwards of a
hundred engravers at work for a dozen years.
Even, they must have had different degrees of
skill; and the likeness of Her Majesty could
not have been equally preserved, as it now
is, in the billions of miniatures which the
best hundred in the profession could have
engraved.

We will now "walk up" to another section
of this curious show:—to the printing-room
behind Fleet Street, and see the printing
going forward. Twelve presses are generally
at work, at each of which presides its
own proper mechanic, who turns out, on an
average, four hundred sheets of two hundred
and forty stamps each—equal to eleven
hundred and fifty thousand stamps—per day.
His work is not different from ordinary copper
or steel plate printing. The workman's plate
is kept warm by a gas-light, and he lays it on
the "bed" of the press before him. He then
grasps a bunch of hard blanketing duly
charged with red ink, and transfers the ink
to the plate with a "wriggling" motion, which
fills up the engraved lines with the pigment.
Next, he carefully and delicately smooths the
polished surface, leaving the ink only in the
lines into which it has been forced. Now, he
seizes a sheet of paper, supplied by Government
—which bears a Crown and a border,
composed of the words "Penny Postage," as
water-mark—and lays it on the plate. Now,
he turns the wheel, which pulls it in between
two cylinders, and they squeeze out the ink
from the lines indented on the steel upon the
paper, and it comes back to its master, radiant
with crimson heads. This back-movement
is the pride of the press; it is caused by the
form of the cylinder (a form which its name
of D suggests), and saves the trouble of the
mechanic's drawing the plate back himself,
Mr. Perkins claims this invention also.

The printed sheets are now taken up-stairs;
where, by a process like whitewashing, their
backs are made adhesive with a peculiar
gum. When gummed, they are placed in
trays, where they become duly ventilated and