CURRENCY AND COINAGE 199 



as money, thus showing how an article which has been 

 domestically usable passes into the class of articles 

 domestically non-usable on becoming money. There is 

 also the tusk-shell money of British Columbia, consisting 

 of clipped dentalium shells in strings of eight sections, 

 divided by bars of goat leather, with a pendant of the 

 haliotis or Venus' s ear. The shells are procurable only 

 under certain conditions, which fact limits their produc- 

 tion, and strings of them become money for precisely 

 the same reason as the bags of broken rice of Burma. 

 The whole of this important point is further illustrated 

 admirably by the honey-sucker feathers of Hawaii, which 

 are stuck in bundles on strips of coco-nut just as they 

 are collected, and are currency, because in this state the 

 feathers are used as a medium of exchange, but are also 

 used for ornaments, clothing, and other domestic purposes. 

 They well indicate, nevertheless, the origin of the use 

 of natural products as money, being plentiful and yet 

 limited in production. The limitation was due to the 

 fact that feather-hunting was a vocation. The feathers, 

 too, had a relative value according to rarity or difficulty 

 in production. Thus five yellow feathers of the ' royal 

 bird/ which were all that the bird could produce, were 

 accounted equal in value to a piece of nankeen, which 

 was sold for one and a half dollars. This would prob- 

 ably represent to the natives at least a pound of our 

 money. 



The Law of Money then is this. An article to be 

 usable as money must be fairly common ; it must be 

 produced, and its production must be limited. And in 

 order to trace the development of money further, we 

 cannot too clearly perceive the difference between cur- 

 rency in kind and currency in money. The former 

 implies the use as a medium of exchange of a domes- 



