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Message:: [QUOTE="GDJMSP, post: 7745947, member: 112"]The "to test its purity" part of that is a bit of a misstatement. It is misleading at best and would of course prompt a question like the one below. Yes, a chop mark could do that much - sometimes. And I say sometimes because it is possible, and often happens, that the silver material on the surface can be pushed down to cover the sides of the chopmark when the chopmark is made. Think of it like this. Pretty much everybody has either seen or at least heard of clad coins where the copper center, usually visible on the edge of the coin, is sometimes covered by the clad plating when the planchet is cut. Resulting in a coin where no copper is visible on the edge. The same kind of thing happens when a coin is chopped. It is also important to understand that using a chopmark to actually test the metal only, and stress only, works on plated coins. Chopmarks in and of themselves do absolutely nothing to test the purity, fineness, of the metal. The point is that chopmarks were used for the most part to tell others who may receive the coin at a later date that the coin was previously tested for fineness by another trusted person. BUT, it is important to realize that the actual testing of the fineness was performed using other tried and true testing methods. And at that time the simplest, fastest, easiest, and reliable testing method there was was to use touch stones and karat needles. A testing method that by the 1800's had already been used and trusted for 2,000 years. And in point of fact the very same method is still used today to test the fineness of silver, gold, and platinum. So what the Chinese merchants would do was to test the coins using touch stones and karat needles to verify the fineness and then chop the coins to tell others that they had tested them and approved the coins.[/QUOTE]

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