they do with the greatest
ease, speed, and exactness in the world.

6. They weigh these, and where they find any to be too heavy they file
them, which they call sizeing them; or light, they lay them by, which
is very seldom, but they are of a most exact weight, but however, in the
melting, all parts by some accident not being close alike, now and then
a difference will be, and, this filing being done, there shall not be
any imaginable difference almost between the weight of forty of these
against another forty chosen by chance out of all their heaps.

7. These round pieces having been cut out of the plates, which in
passing the rollers are bent, they are sometimes a little crooked or
swelling out or sinking in, and therefore they have a way of clapping
100 or 2 together into an engine, which with a screw presses them so
hard that they come out as flat as is possible.

8. They blanch them.

9. They mark the letters on the edges, which is kept as the great secret
by Blondeau, who was not in the way, and so I did not speak with him
to-day.

[Professor W. C. Roberts-Austen, C.B., F.R.S., chemist to the Royal
Mint, refers to Pepys's Diary and to Blondeau's machine in his
Cantor Lectures on "Alloys used for Coinage," printed in the
"journal of the Society of Arts" (vol. xxxii.). He writes, "The
hammer was still retained for coining in the Mint in the Tower of
London, but the question of the adoption of the screw-press by the
Moneyers appears to have been revived in 1649, when the Council of
State had it represented to them that the coins of the Government
might be more perfectly and beautifully done, and made equal to any
coins in Europe. It was proposed to send to France for Peter
Blondeau, who had invented and improved a machine and method for
making all coins 'with the most beautiful polish and equality on the
edge, or with any proper inscription or graining.' He came on the
3rd of September, and although a Committee of the Mint reported in
favour of his method of coining, the Company of Moneyers, who appear
to have boasted of the success of their predecessors in opposing the
introduction of the mill and screw-press in Queen Elizabeth's reign,
prevented the introduction of the machinery, and consequently he did
not produce pattern pieces until 1653.... It is certain that
Blondeau did not invent, but only improved th