engraving in some of our own early colonial settlements were of the
crudest possible description, and yet they are, because of their very
crudeness, far more interesting than the finished product supplied by
firms at home, for the local effort truly represented the country of
its issue in the art of stamp production. The amusingly crude attempts
which the engravers of Victoria have made from time to time, during
the last fifty years, to give us a passable portrait of Her late
Majesty Queen Victoria, have no equal for variety. The stamps of the
first South African Republic, made in Germany, are very appropriate in
their roughness of design and execution. For oddity of appearance the
palm must be awarded to those of Asiatic origin, such, for instance,
as the stamps of Afghanistan, of Kashmir, and most of the local
productions of the Native States of India, marking as they do their
own independent attempts to work up to European methods of
intercommunication.

[Illustration:]




[Illustration:]

VIII.

Great Rarities.


Of the many stamps that are set apart, for one cause or another, from
the ordinary run, as having a history of their own, those that by the