Dies are cut in soft metal and then hardened.

Die-sinking is one of the arts so interesting in all its branches, from the first design to the finished coin or ornament, that every intelligent traveller should endeavour to see it.

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Platers, GILDERS, and electro-platers.—­Large fortunes have been made in Birmingham by plating copper, “in the good old times;” but Sheffield was, until within the last ten years, the principal seat of the manufacture.  Sheffield plate was a very superior article, and for years would look and stand wear like silver.  Plating was effected by laying a thin film of silver on a sheet of copper, which was afterwards shaped into tea or coffee services, forks, spoons, candlesticks, trays, tea urns, and other articles for house use.  It was also applied to harness, saddlery, and every thing formerly made of silver alone.  A great impetus was given to this trade by our intercourse with the continent at the close of the war, which sent steel pronged forks out of fashion.  The first inroad upon the plates on copper was made by the invention of white metal, called German silver.  The next was the discovery of the art of plating by galvanic instead of mechanical agency, now known as electro-plating.  The result of the application of electric power to plating, however, has been to transfer a large share of the Sheffield plate business to Birmingham.  It is a curious fact that a veterinary surgeon (of the name of Askew) invented the first German silver manufactured in England, and that a Dr. Wright, of the same town, discovered the practicability of electro-plating about the same time that several other persons had discovered that metal could be deposited by a galvanic current, but had not thought of applying it practically to manufactures.

The old system of plating is still carried on both in Sheffield and in Birmingham; improvements have been introduced by the employment of a white metal instead of copper as the foundation, and by grafting on, as it were, silver tips to forks and silver edges to prominent ornaments; but the balance of advantage in economy and facility are so greatly in favour of the electro-plating process, that, no doubt, when the patents under which it is now worked expire, its use will become universal.

Since the first patent was published, important improvements have been made in France, Germany, and America, which the original patentees have incorporated.  Copperplates cast from wood cuts and stereotypes can be reproduced with great facility and economy, and the exact touches of an artist in clay or wax can be reproduced in metal without the translation of casting.  Nothing is too small or too large,—­the colossal statue of an Amazon on horseback spearing a lioness, by Kiss, the Berlin sculptor, exhibiting in the Hyde Park Exhibition of 1851, was copied in zinc and bronzed by this process; and, by the same means, flowers, feathers, and even spiders’ webs have been covered with a metal film.