2 8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



would be the need over such territory for the use of bullion or 

 coin as money or the basis of paper representatives of value. 

 And the monetary systems of the peoples among whom com- 

 merce has obtained the greatest development are gradually reach- 

 ing such a basis. The paper representatives of value, which at 

 first were direct representatives of coin, are tending more and 

 more to become the representatives of value, as expressed by the 

 result of effort, without the intervention of coin, and in the fur- 

 therance of this tendency banks perform an essential part. In 

 the evolution of the social organism banks become the ganglia 

 through which the action of the different parts of the organism is 

 measured and made reciprocal. 



And as the use of bank notes, checks, bills of exchange, gov- 

 ernment notes, and other paper representatives of value is most 

 marked among the peoples through whose exertions commerce 

 has attained its highest development, so also the members of a 

 highly civilized community most concerned in commerce make 

 greater use of these paper representatives of value than other 

 members of such a community. In any large city the transac- 

 tions of the principal manufacturers and merchants are chiefly 

 conducted by means of checks, bills, and notes, while clerks, 

 artisans, and laborers, who are principally paid in coin or the 

 direct representatives of coin, secure needed commodities by the 

 immediate exchange of coin or the direct representatives of coin 

 for them. The development of representatives of value not based 

 upon coin to the extent of rendering them generally acceptable 

 for exchange among clerks, artisans, and laborers would still 

 further decrease the dependence upon coin or bullion as money 

 or the basis of money, leaving coin and bullion freer for use in 

 effecting exchanges between peoples of different nationalities who 

 are so separated by language, habits, or institutions that com- 

 mercial intercourse between them must be upon a bullion basis. 



One of the incidents of the recent deep-sea dredging expedition of the 

 Prince of Monaco most fruitful in scientific results was the capture of a 

 sperm whale. It occurring to the prince that the food collections in the 

 animal's stomach might include specimens of creatures still unknown, the 

 ship was held near the whale till it died. In its convulsions it threw up a 

 mass of fragments of very curious cephalopods, which were beginning to 

 float away and he scattered and lost to science, when the ship's screw 

 was reversed to create a counter current, under the advantage of which 

 specimens of two entirely new species, quite different from any hitherto 

 known, were recovered. The body of one was covered with scales, and 

 was more than ninety centimetres long. The other had a crown of ten- 

 tacles armed with suckers bearing claws like those of the larger birds 

 of prey. 



