CURRENCY AND COINAGE 191 



I took the first opportunity that offered to-day of insist- 

 ing on. 



The cause of all the difficulties that beset our investi- 

 gation now is the fact that every section of mankind in 

 every place and at every period, being a product of 

 Nature, has never developed along a single line. Man 

 has always been subjected to and affected by outside 

 influences. He has picked up a little here, snatched 

 a little there, and engrafted what he has caught up on to 

 the tree of his own ideas, with the result that its subse- 

 quent growth has become complicated or even diverted 

 from its original tendency. No semi-civilized group of 

 men has been at any time entirely isolated, and in tracing 

 the development of currency anywhere, the influences of 

 contact with the outside world are everywhere and 

 always more or less plainly apparent. Barter is the 

 natural basis of all dealings between man and man, and 

 the setting up of a common useful article as a medium of 

 exchange is a natural development. But somehow a 

 community under our observation has learnt to count 

 after a fashion. Somebody has taught it how to mea- 

 sure, or in some forgotten way it has been led on to 

 a distinct point further in upward development and has 

 acquired the art of measuring by weighment. When- 

 ever this has happened, and one or more or all of these 

 things have happened nearly always to any community 

 we can study nowadays, complications have ensued. 

 The result is, of course, that in any given concrete 

 instance of barter, it is not by any means to be clearly 

 separated from currency, and vice versa. You will have 

 already perceived this in the course of my present 

 remarks. It must have occurred to you that some of 

 my illustrations of barter are perilously near currency, 

 and that the aptness of some of my cases of currency is 



