THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MONEY—DAVIDSON, 185. 
character. “Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he 
give for his life,” is a text we generally understand in some 
obtuse way to mean a reference to a man’s own skin. What it 
really points to is that, even in the pastoral stage of society 
which the book of Job describes, skins weie the standard of 
value ; and classical writers record the traditions that the earliest 
currency used in Rome, Sparta, and Carthage, was formed of 
leather. Sir John Mandeville, or his unacknowledged authority, 
tells us that in China, when he visited it, leather money was in 
circulation. 
We find what seems a still more modern instance in the fact 
that Saint Louis, the great king of France, finding a great 
scarcity of silver coin wherewith to pay his soldiers, caused 
pieces of silver wire to be fixed on leather and so circulated. 
But this was rather a device for protecting the silver than an 
actual leather money. The silver gave the value, and the 
leather served only as a case to preserve the small piece of silver 
(9 or 18 grs.) from being lost. 
In some communities, particularly those brought into closer 
contact with the traders of advanced race, the blanket of the 
trader has supplanted the original skin currency. This has 
taken place in some parts of the Hudson Bay Company’s terri- 
tory and eleewhere. Along the British Columbia coast also the 
Indians use blankets as the unit of exchange. The blankets are 
distinguished by prints or marks on the edge woven into the 
texture, the best being four-point, the smailest and poorest one 
point. The unit of value in trade is a single two-and-a-half 
point blanket, worth about a dollar and a half. All commodities 
are exchanged according to this standard ; even the four-point 
blanket is said to be worth so many blankets.* 
In the case of these Indians the development may have been 
due to a growing scarcity of fur bearing animals, and perhaps 
from the same reason, and also from natural development, we 
find in Scandinavia, in Iceland, and in the Orkney Islands, 
oP ailihet : Report on the Queen Charlotte Islands. Geol. Survey Report of Canada, 
