186 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MONEY—DAVIDSON. 
that cloth was the standard. Wadmail, or coarse woollen cloth 
formed the basis of an elaborate system of currency in Norway.” 
In Iceland this cloth currency gave place with the develop- 
ment of trade to a currency of stockfish. The foreign traders 
did not desire the northern coarse cloth ; but there was a steady 
market in Southern Europe for fish. There is extant a procla- 
mation for the regulation of trade between England and Iceland 
in which an elaborate scale of prices for articles of all kinds is 
drawn up in terms of dried codfish.t And in Newfoundlond 
cod was for a long time, and still is in many parts, the only coin, 
In general, one may say that whenever there arises a scarcity 
of metallic money in a community which produces one chief 
article for trade, that article will serve as money. Thus cod 
was used in Newfoundland, tobacco in Virginia, wheat and maple 
sugar in Nova Scotia,t tenpenny-nails, as Adam Smith tells us, 
in Kirkaldy, olive oil in the Levant, tea in Central Asia, block 
salt in Abyssinia, and in various parts of Asia and Africa, 
The history of the currency experiments of the Kuropean 
colonies in North America is instructive. These communities 
suttered from a chronic want of coin, one of the results of an 
ill-considered colonial policy. ‘Tobacco was a form of currency 
in Virginia sanctioned, not only by custom, but by actual legis- 
lation. In 1619, the first General Assembly of the colony 
established a ratio between tobacco and silver ; and almost every 
succeeding Assembly dealt with the same question. In 1642, 
tobacco became the sole legal tender; and it was not till 1656 
that silver could again be used if required. But tobacco 
remained the actual medium of exchange, and in 1730 paper 
money, like our modern grain receipts and pig iron warrants, | 
was issued against tobacco. These, along with the commodity, 
formed the main money in Virginia down to the beginning of 
the present century, and were preferred, because more stable in 
value, to the continental currency. In the New England colonies 
a very great variety of articles of trade was made legal tender. 
*Morris and Bax: Socialism, its Growth and Outcome, p. 249 n. 
tRidgeway : op. cit., pp. 18, 19. 
tPatterson: Memoir of the Rev. James MacGregor, D. D., p. 82. 
