78 
E. Thurston — History of the Hast India Company Coinage. [No. 1, 
Delhi. 
a solitary lion, as a devise for the Indian coins. As an appropriate 
type of sovereignty, and as an emblem known and respected wherever 
British rule has been extended, I suggested that the ease, dignity, and 
strength which he so nobly personified on some of the coins of ancient 
Greece would bo still more consistent and characteristic when applied 
to India. Moreover, I suggested that ho might be completely localised 
by the ever-flourishing Palm, an Asiatic though ancient tasteful 
emblem of perpetuity. 
“ I have to solicit the attention of the Committee to a model of 
this devise executed after a drawing by Flaxman.” 
It was agreed that this device was well adapted for one face of the 
new coin, and suggested that either the head of the King (George IV), 
or the designation of the coin within a wreath, should be placed on the 
other face. 
1826. In 1826 the Collector of Delhi expressed his opinion that a 
proposal to establish a mint for copper coinage 
at Delhi would be productive of good to the 
people, and a check to the impositions practised by the shroffs, whose 
source of livelihood consisted in the exaction of discount on the various 
current copper coins. 
1823-27. A volume of the records, 1823-27, is devoted to details 
connected with the construction of the new 
Calcutta. r, , , • , 
Calcutta mint. 
In a report on the regulations for the conduct of the coinage subse- 
quently to its transfer to the new Calcutta mint it is recorded that : — 
I. It was the intention of the Hon. Court that the scale of the 
new mint machinery and establishment should be such as would per- 
manently enable it to supply two-thirds of the coin required for the 
circulation of India ; 
II. It was their design that the remaining third should be supplied 
by similar apparatus of half the power to be sent to Bombay ; 
III. The new Calcutta mint would immediately or eventually 
have to perform the work of the Calcutta mint, and of the mints of 
Benares, Farrukhabad, and Sagar ; 
IV. The Hon. Court held in view that the Calcutta and Bombay 
mints would, at any period found convenient, afEord the means of 
equalising the coins, and of rendering uniform the coinages of India. 
1827. In a letter dated 28th August, 1827, the Mint Master of the 
‘‘ new mint,” Bombay, expressed his opinion 
that the Bombay division into rupees, quarters, 
and reas was preferable to the rupees, annas, and pie of the other side 
of India, and that the division of the gold mohur into fifteen parts was 
decidedly superior to the Calcutta division into sixteen. 
Bombay. 
