Use of Cowry-shells for Currency, Amutlets, etc, 187 
before their makers had any intercourse with white per- 
sons. The presence of the cowries, therefore, is of special 
interest. ; 
The shells were sent by the discoverer to Dr. \W. H. 
Dall, another of America’s leading conchologists, and the 
following extraordinary statement was received in reply :— 
“T should incline to the belief that the cowries were 
imported in or about the time of Columbus’ voyages. 
Bound, as they supposed, for the Indies, where the 
cowry was formerly (like our wampum) a staple 
article of barter, the exploring vessels would undoubt- 
edly have carried cowries as well as the other articles 
of trade we know they carried. It would not have 
taken them long to find out that cowries did not pass 
as currency with American natives, and reporting this 
on their return to Spain later traders would not have 
carried them for barter. The necklace or bracelet 
you obtained may have passed from hand to hand as 
a curiosity (as I have known such things to do) until 
it reached a people who knew nothing of the whites 
till much later. In fact your cowries may have come 
off one of Columbus’ own vessels ! ” 
But an even more remarkable story is that given in 
“Harper's Monthly Magazine” for September (1916, 
p. 599), by Mr. H. Newell Wardle, of the Philadelphia 
Academy of Natural Science, as follows :— 
“The great Genoese, starting in 1492 on his first 
voyage to discover a new route to the kingdom of the 
Great Khan, doubtless stocked his ships with a goodly 
store of these ivory-white porcelain shells. He had 
been in Guinea. He knew the requirements of the 
Gold Coast trade .... Probably, though he fails to 
mention it, cowries, strung as for the Guinea trade, 
were part of his stock—an ill-venture, in competition 
