ISO 



to provide that from fifty to a thousand should be struck in 

 bronze, ami discreetly distributed. After having gone to 

 the expense of striking a die, the additional expense of a 

 quantity in bronze is but trifling, the same die serving for 

 -every variety of metal. 



The governor of a state, or the president of the associa- 

 tion, should receive a certain number to present to cabinets 

 and note- worthy persons. In every medal created by vol- 

 untary subscription, it should be provided that each sub- 

 scriber should have one in bronze. 



If the companions of Kane and Hartstene had each been 

 voted a copy of the medals awarded to their chiefs, what 

 an incentive to acts of daring and self-sacrifice. 



The monument devised for Col. Bliss by our state, would 

 with greater certainty have a long duration, if the expense 

 for the two supplementary medals in gold, one in the state 

 library and the other at West Point, had been incurred for 

 a hundred medals in bronze. 



Another noticeable oversight with respect to the Kane 

 and Hartstene medals, is that those who ordered them from 

 the artists, allowed them to be struck without embodying 

 on either surface any lettered inscription, not even the 

 motto Excelsior of the arms of the state. After the medals 

 had been struck, an inscription had to be engraved upon 

 the edge of each, for the die did not contain it. Medallists 

 in describing a medal, speak only of the two sides ; the 

 edge is not supposed by them to have an inscription, for it 

 will not stand the ravages of time. Not one modern medal 

 in a thousand is without a lettered inscription on the sur- 

 face, and very few have an inscription on the edge. Coins 

 may properly have inscriptions on their edges to preserve 

 them from being clipped. In consequence of the oversight 

 regarding these two medals, when a copy of them is made 

 in bronze, the inscription on the edge is necessarily want- 

 ing, and they present no evidence on either side of the 

 source and design of the medal, except that which is 



