'ATKINSON. — BASIS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. 21T 



does him harm, yet he seeks wliat he believes to be his own benefit. For 

 instance, in buying quack medicines he thinks he is benefited by par- 

 taking of the sarsaparilla in Ayer's compound. What he really gets is 

 twenty-six per cent by volume of alcohol, — in Hood's sarsaparilla 

 about nineteen per cent. In other words, he secures a stimulant more 

 active than sherry or Madeii'a wine, perhaps even in this way to his 

 benefit. Dealings in noxious or fraudulent compounds are, however, 

 very small relatively to the dealings in materials necessary to existence. 



Again. I have stated that man is the only animal that has invented 

 money. Money is a medium of exchange, a necessary tool in the con- 

 duct of commerce, which is for mutual benefit. All records, prehistoric 

 and modern, prove the existence of commerce and the use of money. If 

 I am rightly informed, the recent discoveries in Assyria and Babylonia 

 prove the existence of a wide commerce, of wiiich many of the terra-cotta 

 plates give the records. The standard of that period has been stated to 

 me by Professor Lyon as what might be called a silver " bob." That 

 fact brings up a ditfirult problem. It would appear that silver existed 

 in sufficient quantity to serve as a money metal four thousand years be- 

 fore Christ. It is proved by the Old Testament Scriptures that the shekel 

 or weight of silver in the time of Abraham — about 2500 B.C., I be- 

 lieve — was the money of the merchant. Yet no deposits of native sil- 

 ver have ever been discovered of sufficient magnitude to supply even a 

 small coinage. Native gold and native copper have been found in large 

 quantities, and have served for monetary use ; but silver is at the present 

 time the product of complex processes of smelting and separation from 

 the ore. Whence came this prehistoric silver? Did smelting and assay- 

 ing exist and for a time become a lost art ? 



At a later period, when cattle constituted the medium of exchange, did 

 the silver disappear, or did cattle, being more abundant and silver rela- 

 tively difficult to provide, displace silver as money of the known world 

 at that time ? The evidence of the use of cattle for monetary purposes 

 extends from Asia into Scythia, thence across the whole of Europe, even 

 into Ireland. The tariff of the lawful charges of the physician or of the 

 cleanser and bather is given in the Zend-Avesta in terms of cattle, among 

 which female slaves are counted. 



Then gold appears again, or rather a natural alloy of gold and silver 

 known as electron, which, according to Ridgeway, — whose recent book 

 upon coinage and weight measures is based upon the methods of evolu- 

 tion, as distinguished from the development of coinage under the appli- 

 cation of the higher mathematics, — had begun to circulate in the form 



