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exchange value relative to the price of all articles of 
trade. Slaves and cattle in particular were always 
valued in chank-sheils. Thus while a male slave was 
worth one cow and three chank-shells, a female slave— 
much more valuable, the suffragettes will learn with 
pleasure, than a mere man—was worth as much as 
three cows and four or five chank-shells. Now a cow 
was valued at ten chank-shells, a pig at two shells, a goat 
was the same rate, and a fowl at one packet of salt. As 
a chank-shell was considered worth one rupee, a short 
calculation willshow that a male slave was worth Rs. 13, 
and a female slave Rs. 34, or 34 shells. The ransoms of 
villages captured during raids in these good old days 
were largely paid in chank-shells, beads, cows, pigs and 
other portable wealth. Chank-shells and beads were the 
chief items of currency but even in Butler’s time, the 
inevitable invasion of the rupee was already successful in 
the valleys most accessible to low-country traders. At 
the village of Hosang-hajoo the chief remarked to Major 
Butler, with a show of considerable pride, “since we 
became British subjects, we have paid revenue in coin 
and with it we can procure anything we require; we 
therefore no longer want shells and beads.” 
I see no reason to believe that chank currency ever 
extended beyond the hill peoples of Assam and possibly 
some of the adjoining hill tracts. On some coins issued 
by the ancient Pandiyan and Chalukyan dynasties of 
southern India a chank-shell appears as the principal 
symbol (Thurston, I, 328); this might be held as evi- 
dence of a preceding currency consisting of the actual 
object so represented, whereof the memory was perpe- 
tuated in pictorial form upon one face of the coins and 
tokens which came to take its place as more convenient 
units of exchange. But there is much more reason to 
believe that the chank was represented on such coins for 
a similar reason to that which actuates the present-day 
States of Travancore and Cochin to adopt a similar 
symbol on their current coins. In these two States, the 
nomes of southern Hindu orthodoxy, the chank- shell 
symbolizes the religious belief of the ruling race and is 
their emblem as the rose stands for England and the 
thistle for Scotland. Both these States utilized it asa 
distinctive symbol on their earliest issues of local postage 
stamps in place of and to the exclusion of the sovereign’s 
head—the customary pivot of design in European stamps. 
