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 were 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 smallest 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, 



*Dawson : Report on the Queen Charlotte Islands. Geol. Survey Report of Canada, 



looU 



