Glasgow.
[In the Board-room of the workhouse of St. Margaret's, Westminster, is
a portrait of Margaret Patten, which corresponds with the picture just
described, and bears the following inscription:
"MARGARET PATTEN, aged 136: the Gift of John Dowsell, William Goff,
Matthew Burnett, Thomas Parker, Robert Wright, John Parquot, Overseers,
anno 1737."
Margaret Patten was buried in the burial-ground of what was then called the
Broadway Church, now Christ Church, and there is a stone on the eastern
boundary wall inscribed, "Near this place lieth MARGARET PATTEN, who died
June 26, 1739, in the Parish Workhouse, aged 136." In Walcott's _Memorials
of {443} Westminster_, p. 288., we are told "she was a native of
Lochborough, near Paisley. She was brought to England to prepare Scotch
broth for King James II., but, owing to the abdication of that monarch,
fell into poverty and died in St. Margaret's workhouse, where her portrait
is still preserved. Her body was followed to the grave by the parochial
authorities and many of the principal inhabitants, while the children sang
a hymn before it reached its last resting-place."]
_Etymology of "Coin."_--What is the etymology of our noun and verb _coin_
and _to coin_? I do not know if I have been anticipated, but beg to suggest
the following:--_Coin_, a piece of cornered metal; _To coin_, the act of
cornering such block of metal.
In Cornwall, the blocks of tin, when first run into moulds from the
smelting furnace, are _square_; and when the metal is to be fined or
assayed, the miner's phrase is, that it is to be _coined_; for the
_corners_ of the moulded block are _cut off_, and subjected to the _assay_;
and the decree of fineness proved is stamped on the now cornerless
block--thereafter called a _coin of tin_. It is, I conceive, by no means a
violent supposition that such _coins of tin_ were current as money very
many ages before either silver, gold, copper, bronze, lead, tin, or any
other metal moulded, stamped, engraved, or fashioned into such coins as we
now know had come into use. We know to what far-back ages the finding of
tin carries us, its find being entirely confined to Cornwall; its presence
near the surface in an ore readily reduced and easily melted making its
reduction into the metallic state possible in the very rudest state of
society and of the arts.