THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MONEY—DAVIDSON. 197 
which they are kept and used as money, but they are intended 
to be divided into two, heated and made into hoes. . . . 
Ready made hoes are not often used in barter. Iron, as above 
mentioned, is preferred, and is taken to the blacksmith to be 
fashioned according to the owner’s requirements.’* But in 
Darfur the actual hoe serves as currency. “It is simply a plate 
of iron fitted with a socket. A handle is fitted into this socket 
and one has an implement suited for chopping the weeds in the 
corn fields. Purchases of small value are made with the hoe 
from one to twenty,’+ which may be said to be its legal tender 
limit. Larger purchases are made by means of cotton cloth and 
oxen. Among the wild tribes of Annam, in Asia, also, the hoe 
serves as currency, and in ancient times many nations seem to 
have used it. We know that the Chinese had originally a 
barter currency of real hoes and real knives, articles in great 
demand among them. These in time became conventionalised in 
form, and were reduced in size to serve as real money. The 
Chinese cash is the survival of the original knife money, while 
the hoe, in a certain form, still circulates in Thibet, as it did in 
China hundreds of years ago. Within recent years the 
Thibetans have adopted the Indian rupee; but have not pre- 
served its integral form. They cut it up for purposes of small 
change into little pieces which represent the conventionalized 
form of their own original hoe currency. 
The hoe served as a general article of barter because of its 
indispensability in agriculture ; but among fishermen the fish- 
hook was a more useful and desirable implement. Among the 
fishermen of the Persian Gulf, and round the coast to Ceylon 
and the Maldive Islands, there was originally a fish-hook cur- 
rency ; and when true money was adopted the old form was 
retained. Down till the beginning of the present century larins, 
a bent piece of silver wire, the conventionalized form of the 
fish-hook, were in circulation ; and it is possible that, had the 
natural process of evolution gone on without interference from 
*Quoted Ridgeway, op. cit., p. 43. 
+Ridgeway, op. cit., p. 45. 
