190 THE EVOLUTION OF 



rough matting and sheep-skins, and even their taxes are 

 paid with the mulberry. In fact the mulberry is the 

 measure tubeteika, the currency of Darwaz, and many 

 Darwazes never know the taste of bread all their lives 

 long. . . . The grain measure is the batman^ 45 tube- 

 teikas? 



The value of this bit of evidence consists in the fact 

 that when the dried mulberries were made up into tube- 

 teikas or measures, the tubeteikas became conventional 

 articles or tokens. This indicates the next crucial 

 advance in reasoning. When we make a purely con- 

 ventional article, i.e. a token, usable only as a medium 

 of exchange and for no other purpose, we have set up 

 a system of money, for money consists of tokens con- 

 vertible into property. So many imitation, not real, 

 spearheads can buy an adze : so many an axe. Money 

 is in fact currency of a particular sort, and the progres- 

 sive reasoning that has brought it into existence is this. 

 Barter is the exchange of one article for another, 

 currency implies exchange through a medium, money 

 that the medium is a token, i. e. something of no domes- 

 tic use, conventionally made and not at all necessarily 

 of metal. 



The state of transition from currency in kind to cur- 

 rency in money is so remote from the conditions in which 

 modern English people have been brought up, that its 

 existence is not readily to be grasped. It constitutes, 

 however, an advance in reasoning so decided that the 

 tracing of the conditions under which it arose is beset 

 with difficulties. Here the fundamental law to be ob- 

 served in all anthropological research, which I have so 

 far pointed to as merely a matter of observation, becomes 

 a law on which our deductions have to be based, i. e. of 

 the first importance. It is the Law of Contact, which 



