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Show V? - b ; nj:. , (xyv . ,yM ; I Woman of Palestine Wearing Her Money Wealth aa Ornament. (Prepared br the National Qeographle Society, Waahtngton, D. C THE United States has settled down to tbe use of the small size paper money so completely that the occasional large bill that Is encountered seems awkward. One more chapter has been written In the long etory of money. Man bos used money In some form since the dawn of civilization. Fishhooks Fish-hooks and slave girls, beads, hawks and hounds, all have served as a medium of exchange. Early Virginians bought wives with tobacco. Once, It Is said, Mexican Indians used cacao beans, until aboriginal crooks began making clay counterfeits, baked and varnished to look like the real. The study of money, as an Instrument Instru-ment of trade through the ages, involves in-volves art, heraldry, and mythology ; It leads to economics and politics and far Into history. When kingdoms rose, often new moneys rose wltb them; and, when they fell, their moneys passed away. Nothing shakes a government gov-ernment like tbe depreciation of Its money. The very progress of civilization civiliza-tion Itself may be largely measured by the pace at which the various moneys of the world have been standardized and accepted by International commerce. com-merce. It was, to a large degree, tbe quest for gold and silver, and their use in coined money, which led to the exploration and settlement of America, Amer-ica, Australia, and South Africa. The metal-disk money of the West to that borderland of Europe and Asia that was then the West The nearest approach to an article that would function as such waa the milk-faced ox. This . animal possessed one prime requisite of money. It wag generally recognized as a thing of value desired of all men. Money must primarily be something that every man wants, for which he will exchange any of bis ordinary or-dinary commodities, and tbe ox came nearer meeting this test 1,000 B. O, In tbe triangle that was Greece, Egypt and Palestine, than did any other element ele-ment of wealth among the masses. The peoples from which Western civilization sprang were pastoral folk, their wealth being represented In sheep and cattle. Gradually they came to measure other values by the unit of the herd, the ox. A little later armor was priced in oxen. A knight could buy a serviceable suit of armor for ten oxen, but one of choice workmanship workman-ship would cost fifty. The modern word "pecuniary," from pecus, cattle, has Its place In our language lan-guage because cattle were once money. Sheep represented a lower monetary denomination. They were small change! Ten sheep equaled one ox. After copper was mined In Cyprus and pots made of It these utensils came to be used for money. Later conveniently Bhoped strips of copper replaced pots as a medium of exchange ex-change and later still these were of waa born In Lydla, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, about 2,000 years ago. Cowrie, the lowly shell money of the antipodes, has through the ages been the most widely circulated rival of the metal disk; but Its day of dominance has departed. Only isolated communities commu-nities still cling to it as money. Tet cowrie can' boast that mora people bave used It than have clinked the metal disks In all their varieties. It has served a greater number of human beings aa a medium of exchange than any other money devised by man, China's Metal Coin. The cash of China, corns with holes In them, still dominate the marts of many men In a considerable corner of the Asiatic world. There exist Inscribed In-scribed cash pieces attributed to 1115-1079 1115-1079 B. C. and similar pieces, unln-scribed, unln-scribed, believed to be earlier. The tao, also of China, was one of the first metal coins in the world. The word means "knife" or "shnrpeO-edged Instrument," hence the name was applied ap-plied to the razor-shaped coins of old China, Tbe earliest Chinese metal coins are hallpvMl fn hnvo hpon minlntitra a uenuiue weignc wnen anrewa traa-ers traa-ers debased tbe copper by mixing cheaper metals with It, or gave the pieces a short weight, It became necessary nec-essary for the local government to step in, test the metal, and certify to its value by a stamp. Thug the modern mod-ern Idea of metal money of value was born. When copper became plentiful and therefore cheap, it was too bulky to serve as the principal money. Silver displaced It and ruled the money world for 2,000 years. In time the same thing happened wltb silver that bad happened with copper. It became too bulky to figure In large transactions. Gold, which had always been In the background as money, was brought forward to become the standard money metal. Token Coinage and Paper Money. Metal money did not remain wholly a matter of intrinsic value. It was discovered almost by accident that a strong government could take a piece of metal of relatively low value, stamp a higher value on it and have It accepted ac-cepted In trade as though It were truly worth the stamped amount TTiiiq tnkpn nlnflPff np nnrfprvalnA spades, unlnscrlbed and without perforation per-foration and with open shank for Inserting In-serting a handle. Some authorities place them earlier than 2000 B. C. Convenience for carrying Is accepted accept-ed as accounting for the introduction and long use of perforated coins by China and its neighbors. From earliest times a string has been the poor man's pocketbook. There bave been many unique moneys in different countries. Nails were once so precious that they were used as money In Scotland and in New England in pre-revolutlon days. And while the mark was skidding to zero after the World war, postmasters In remote parts of Germany used shoe nallg for small-change purposes they had a fixed utility value. Bars of crystal salt are money In many parts of Ethiopia. This medium of exchange, however, suffers deterioration deteriora-tion in a strange way. It has become a nice courtesy, wben meeting a friend, to proffer a coin to be licked 1 So does the money lose weight through friendly hospitality, and It Is to be hoped that th salt acts as a germicide! germi-cide! The island of Tap, of the Caroline group, neighbors in the remote way of the South seas wltb the Philippines and New Guinea, undoubtedly boasts money, came Into existence, marking another important step In money's evolution. It was partly real value and partly valne based on trust In the Issuing agency. In the United States all of our small silver, nickel and copper cop-per coins are tokens. None of them will melt down Into metal of as great value as the denomination stamped on It. Paper money may be looked upon as token money carried to Its final extreme. ex-treme. A piece of It has no value at all In Itself; the value depends wholly on a promise printed on It But although al-though the Idea of paper money might be expected to have developed easily from token money, no one In the West seems to have considered tbe matter feasible until more than a thousand years after token coins appeared. Paradoxically, the first "paper" money was a brick; for the germ of the Idea seems to bave been born in Babylonia more than two thousand years before the Christian era. Bonds for the repayment of loans were written writ-ten on clay tablets and baked. These passed from hand to hand as representations repre-sentations of the amounts Involved. Similarly, deposits were made with Individuals, In-dividuals, and clay-brick drafts were written against them. Later brick bills of exchange transferred wealth from the strangest of money. It is of stone and the coins are sometimes 12 fee,t In diameter and weight many hundreds of pounds 1 When Cattle Were Money. It Is nearly 3,000 years back to the time of Homer, when there was no such thing In the Western world as money. People bartered In the markets, mar-kets, exchanging suckling goats for woven rugs. There were neither ducats nor dollars In which to price them, nor was there an established measure of value. The habit of haggling, still prevalent, may have come down from those ancient days of barter. Tbe Idea of money was not yet born place to place. In Europe paper to represent money first came into use, apparently, during the Middle ages when the Jewish financiers of those days reinvented the bills of exchange of Babylonia and recorded them in ink on parchment and paper. Individuals also accepted deposits of coin and bullion for safe keeping and Issued receipts payable on drniand. Thus, the first modern gold and silver certificates circulated from hand to hand In place of the deposits. de-posits. Tbe Bank of St George at Genoa and the Bank of Venice were tbe first corporations to use paper money. |