udy of the stamps of his chosen country with all the thoroughness of
the modern specialist. He unearths from forgotten State documents and
dusty files of official gazettes the official announcements
authorising each issue. He inquires into questions surrounding the
choice of designs, the why and wherefore of the chosen design, the
name of the engraver, the materials and processes used in the
production of the plates, the size of the plates, and the varying
qualities of the paper and ink used for printing the stamps--in fact,
nothing that can complete the history of an issue, from its inception
to its use by the public, escapes his attention. He constitutes
himself, in truth, the historian of postal issues. The scope for
interesting study thus opened up is almost boundless. It includes
inquiries into questions of heraldry in designs, of currency in the
denominations used, of methods of engraving dies, of the transference
of the die to plates, of printing from steel plates and from
lithographic stones, of the progress of those arts in various
countries, of the manufacture, the variety, and the quality of the
paper used--from the excellent hand-made papers of early days to the
commonest printing papers of the present day--of postal revenues and
postal developments, of the crude postal issues of earliest times, and
the exquisite machine engraving of many current issues.

He who fails to see any justification for money spent and time given
up to the collecting of postage stamps will scarcely deny that these
lines of study, which by no means exhaust the list, can scarcely fail
to be both fascinating and profitable, even when regarded from a
purely educational standpoint. It is true it may be contended that all
collectors do not go thus deeply into stamp collecting as a study;
nevertheless the tendency sets so strongly in the direction of
combining study with the pleasure of collecting, that the man who
nowadays neglects to study his stamps is apt to fall markedly behind
in the competition that is ever stimulating the stamp collector in his
pleasant and friendly rivalry with his fellows.

Then, again, an ever-increasing supply of new issues from one or other
of the many groups of stamp-issuing countries periodically revives the
interest of the flagging collector, and binds him afresh to the hobby
of his choice. Old, seasoned collectors, whose interest once set never
flags from youth to age, relegate new issues to a back seat.