As to the Mercator silver map medal, the Field Museum of Natural History here in Chicago included one in a wonderful exhibit of historical maps a couple of years ago. Their website credits the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Yale for the loan.

I am not in a position to say if it was an original or an early copy. I can only vouchsafe that I was impressed by it. The exhibit notes credit it to 1581.

In the last issue, there is a small problem with the photo of the Macedonia coin hoard. It seems that the journalist used a hoard from the UK to illustrate a story.

The illustration accompanying this story is of an ancient Celtic gold coin hoard from Britain, as the "Copyright Portable Antiquities Scheme" cutline suggests. So these coins are not Byzantine and they were not found in Macedonia. (The original story is unillustrated.)

It appears from this story that the 13th-century Byzantine coins in the hoard were gold, while the Venetian coins were silver (the Venetian gold ducat was not placed in circulation until 1285, late in the century), though one has to read to the penultimate paragraph for this to be clear. Despite the descriptions in the article, both series have very similar designs, with ruler and saint on one side and Christ or the Virgin on the other.

Folks in Galena may stake their claim to U.S. Grant, noting his pre-Civil War residency in that town. However, the St. Louis area has just as much a claim to Grant, if not more so, than Galena.

During the 1850s, Grant lived at White Haven with wife Julia Dent Grant, the estate being of the Dent family. These were hard times for the Grants, and ultimately after about six tough years in St. Louis, the Grants moved to Galena in 1860.

http://www.nps.gov/ulsg/historyculture/jdgrant.htm
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/grant/timeline/index.html

I think NGC is being a bit disingenuous about their ability to penetrate surface plating on a coin using XRF. If I understand their method correctly, it is totally non destructive but does not tell us about the alloy composition of the interior of the coin. Their method will provide an analysis of the surface layer only, perhaps only a few atoms deep at most.

I too recall the "Dorian Gray" episode where he pulls out the coin cabinet and studies each piece intently. It is perhaps unique in cinema to see numismatic activity portrayed in such a fashion.