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 

 cornfields. 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 ueed 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 Ridge way, op. cit., p. 43. 

 +Ridgeway, op. cit., p. 45. 



