Trial of the Coins

FISCAL Trial of theCoins This week, as on every second Wednesday in February for the last 152 years, the Trial of the Coins was held at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. One of the few purely traditional ceremonies in U.S. government, it passed almost unnoticed.

The coins--261,064 of them--had piled up all last year in the pyx box*--one coin from each batch (or part thereof) of 2,000 silver coins delivered from the coining room to the superintendent of all U.S. mints during the year. The Assay Commission (eleven Presidential civilian appointees, three ex-officio members), using the official mint weights, went to work, testing, weighing, counting. To nobody's surprise, the commission found the U.S.'s 1944 coinage sound.

It has been found so since Congress, at the suggestion of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, instituted the custom in 1792. Only once has a ripple of discord disturbed the ceremony. In 1801 the trial had to be postponed after the seat of government was moved from Philadelphia to Washington. At this unseemly break in an established tradition, Mint Director Elias Boudinot wrote indignantly to President John Adams, protesting that public confidence in the federal coinage was being undermined.

-A 4-ft.-long, metal-bound walnut chest named for the chest which once reposed in Westminster Abbey's Chapel of the Pyx, now rests in England's Mint, where newly minted British coins are deposited for Britain's annual coinage-testing: the Trial of the Pyx.

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