Unfortunately the British East india Company rupee dated 1840 depicting the lovely head of a young Queen Victoria didn't arrive quite in time for last week's blog posting. But such an attractive coin deserves a blog of it's own.

Refering to the 19th century edition of the "Standard Catalog of World Coins" we find the 1840 dated rupees of Queen Victoria listed in two varieties. The first variety has a continuous obverse legend " QUEEN VICTORIA" while the second variety illustrated herewith has this legend divided.

For collectors that like minute differences in detail they can begin with counting the tiny berries in the sprays or branches on the reverse of this series.

The three mints located at Calcutta, Madras and Mumbai (Bombay) used dies with other little varieties and a complete collection of circulation strikes would number about 19 different coins.

The example illustrated happens to be KM# 458.2 and was recently purchased from David Laties at Educational Coin Company.

This coin has the raised initials W. W. (for W. Wyon) on the truncation. As for berries I counted 13 in the left branch and 15 in the  right branch. Now comes the tough part - small or large diamonds (diacritical marks) below the Persian denomination of "Yek Rupiyah"? After making some enlargements of photos in house and comparing them to the actual enlargements made of this coin I found by splitting hairs that these are actually large diamonds. Quite an exercise for determining what particular coin I do have but then this is just a small part of being a numismatic cataloger for over three decades.