528 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



and the colonies of the United States. It was a remarkable coinci- 

 dence that all three names by which the Spanish dollar was best known, 

 namely the " peso," " piastre " and " piece of eight," began with the 

 letter p and all three were pluralized by the use of the letter s. Hence 

 p and ps admirably answered as abbreviations of any of these names. 

 The symbols in Fig. 3 show that the usual abbreviation was a ps or p, 

 the letter p taking sometimes a florescent form and the s in ps being 

 as a rule raised above the p. The p and the s are often connected, 

 showing that they were written in these instances by one uninterrupted 

 motion of the pen. As seen in Fig. 3, the same manuscript sometimes 

 shows symbols of widely different shapes. The capital P is a rare 

 occurrence. We have seen it used at the beginning of sentences and a 

 few times written in ledgers at the top of columns of figures. In the 

 sixteenth century the ps had above it a mark indicating the omission 

 of part of the word, thus ps. Sometimes the contraction of the word 

 " pesos " was " pss." or " pos." Not infrequently two or more different 

 abbreviations are found in one and the same manuscript. The body 

 of the text may contain the word written out in full, or contracted to 

 " pss " or " pos," while the margin or the head of a column of figures 

 may exhibit ps or simply p. These were the abbreviations used by the 

 Spanish-Americans from the sixteenth century down to about 1820 or 



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Fig. 4. The Modern Dollar Mark in the Making. From copy of letter by 

 Oliver Pollock at New Orleans to George Roger Clark, 1778. (Wis. Hist. Libr., 

 Madison, Draper Coll., Vol. 38 J, p. 37.) 



1830. The transition from the ps to our modern dollar mark was not 

 made by the Spaniards; it was made by the English-speaking people 

 who came in contact with the Spaniards. At the time when Mexico 

 achieved its independence (1821), the $ was not yet in vogue there. 



