EVOLUTION OF THE DOLLAR MARK 525 



several considerations. The fact that in the same manuscript exactly 

 the same symbol occurs in " vez" 5 ," the contraction for " vezinos," or 

 " neighbors/' may suffice ; an 8 is meaningless here. 



We have now described the various hypotheses. 133 . The reader may 

 have been amused at the widely different conclusions reached. One 

 author gives to the $ " a pedigree as long as chronology itself." Others 

 allow it only about 125 years. One traces it back to the worshippers 

 of the sun in central Asia, another attributes it to a bookkeeper in a 

 Virginia tobacco district. Nearly every one 



of the dozen theories seemed so simple to /"""lo /?♦ r~>0 

 its advocate as to be self-evident. A mode /^^ n&ST- • 



of argumentation is revealed much like / J ** 



that of the prospective western farmer g 

 planning to solve the problem of irrigation FlG 2 . 



by planting rows of potatoes between rows 



of onions, " to make the potato-eyes water." He was thoroughly infatu- 

 ated with the brilliancy of his idea and of course never subjected it to a 

 sober test. 



In our own researches we have been driven from one working 

 hypothesis to another, until finally we found one which tallied with the 

 facts. Noticing that as a rule the common abbreviations for monetary 

 units used in recent centuries consisted in the initial letter, or that 

 letter and a second one in the word, as M for the German " mark," 

 fr. for the French "franc," £ for the English "pound" (libra), we 

 started with the provisional theory that $ came from the letters in the 

 word "dollar." To test the theory we began the examination of colonial 

 manuscripts and made galloping progress in showing that " dollar " 

 was in colonial days actually abbreviated to " Dolls.," " Doll.," " Do. 8 ," 

 " D s ," " D." But in endeavoring to show the evolution of D into 

 $ we encountered insuperable difficulties. Thousands of manuscripts were 

 looked over and they absolutely failed to supply the necessary connect- 

 ing links. We had to throw our theory overboard as a useless burden. 



The history of the dollar mark is difficult to trace. The vast 

 majority of old documents give monetary names written out in full. 

 This is the case also in printed books. Of nine Spanish commercial 

 arithmetics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, five gave no 

 abbreviations whatever for the "peso" (also called "piastre," "peso 

 de 8 reales," "piece of eight," " Spanish dollar"). In fact some did 

 not mention the " peso " at all. The reason for the omission of " peso " 

 is that the part of Spain called Castile had monetary units called 

 " reales," " ducados," " maravedises," etc. ; the word " peso " was used 

 mainly in Spanish America and those towns of Spain that were in 



" a Interesting lines of research on the origin of $ were suggested by 

 Professor D. E. Smith in his "Kara Arithmetics, " 1908, pp. 470, 471, 491, but 

 we found them barren of results. 



