202 THE EVOLUTION OF 



i. e. of rarity or difficulty of production. For instance, 

 take the brack money of the Pellew Islands in the South 

 Pacific. Here we have highly finished terra-cotta beads, 

 very valuable ; jasper, agate, and enamel beads, valuable ; 

 green and white glass beads in four grades of relative, 

 but low, values. Then we have strings of small, highly 

 finished shell disks, fifty-four to the inch, in the Banks 

 Islands, of very high value ; while beads of sorts made 

 of mother of pearl, red and other stones, nutshells, 

 tortoise-shell, and coco-nuts bear low values. In exactly 

 the same way the Venetian and Aggry beads, with their 

 long and ancient history, and other beads bear in Africa 

 ever varying values proportionate to kind and temporary 

 rarity, as do also the blue glass beads of the Kaffres of 

 South Africa. The wampum beads of North America, 

 in what may be called their natural state, bore a relative 

 value of one purple to two white, owing to relative rarity, 

 and in their manufactured state imported from Europe 

 they bore a value in strings by the inch and fathom 

 dependent on cost of production and importation, or, as 

 we should say, on their intrinsic value. On the other 

 hand, the ' dashes ' or beads for ornament of West Africa 

 have no value as money. 



Mankind has thus arrived at the notion of money by 

 a very slow process step by step, and by the use locally 

 of any articles, natural or manufactured, that happened, 

 for the place and time to satisfy the conditions of 

 a medium of exchange abundance, production, limita- 

 tion. These articles have been of any nature, and 

 among them the metals and articles made of metal 

 have had to take their chance of general acceptance 

 with the rest, and have come to the top and outdistanced 

 all the rest among civilized peoples merely in obedience 

 to the great general natural law of the survival of the 



