622 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 
in themselves that I should wish to give many instances, but I must confine 
myself now to one or two. The student will find on investigation, for instance, 
that however childish the reasoning of savages may appear to be on abstract 
subjects, and however silly some of their customs may seem, they are neither 
childish nor silly in reality. They are almost always the result of ‘ correct 
argument from a false premiss’—a mental process not unknown to eivilised 
races. The student will also surely find that savages are not fools where their 
concrete interests are concerned, as they conceive those interests to be. For 
example, in commerce, beads do not appeal to savages merely because they are 
pretty things, except for purposes of adornment. They will only part with 
articles they value for particular sorts of beads which are to them money, in 
that they can procure in exchange for them, in their own country, something 
they much desire. They have no other reason for accepting any kind of bead in 
payment for goods. On few anthropological points can mistakes be made more 
readily than on this, and when they are made by merchants, financial disaster 
can well follow, so that what I have already said elsewhere as io this may bear 
repetition in part here. Savages in their bargains with civilised man 
never make one that does not, for reasons of their own, satisfy themselves. 
Each side, in such a case, views the bargain according to its own interest. On 
his side, the trader buys something of great value to him, when he has taken 
it elsewhere, with something of little value to him, which he has brought from 
elsewhere, and then, and only then, can he make what is to him a magnificent 
bargain. On the other hand the savage is more than satisfied, because with 
what he has got from the trader he can procure from among his own people 
something he very much covets, which the article he parted with could not 
have procured for him. Both sides profit by the bargain from their respective 
points of view, and traders cannot, as a matter of fact, take undue advantage 
of savages, who, as a body, part with products of little or no value to themselves 
for others of vital importance, though these last may be of little or none to the 
civilised trader. The more one dives into recorded bargains, the more clearly 
one sees the truth of this view. 
I have always advocated personal inquiry into the native currency and 
money, even of pre-British days, of the people amongst whom a Britisher’s 
lot is cast, for the reason that the study of the mental processes that lead 
up to commercial relations, internal and external, the customs concerned with 
daily buying and selling, take one more deeply into aliens’ habits of mind and 
their outlook on practical life than any other branch of research. The student 
will find himself involuntarily acquiring a knowledge of the whole life of a 
people, even of superstitions and local politics, matters that commercial men, 
as well as administrators, cannot, if they only knew it, ever afford to ignore. 
The study has also a great intellectual interest, and neither the man of commerce 
nor the man of affairs should disregard this side of it if he would attain 
success in every sense of that term. 
Just let me give one instance from personal experisnce. A few years back 
a number of ingots of tin, in the form of birds and animals and imitations 
thereof, hollow tokens of tin ingots, together with a number of rough notes 
taken on the spot, were handed over to me for investigation and report. They 
came from the Federated Malay States, and were variously said to have been 
used as toys and as money in some form. A long and careful investigation 
unearthed the whole story. They turned out to be surviving specimens of an 
obsolete and forgotten Malay currency. Bit by bit, by researches into 
travellers’ stories and old records, European and vernacular, it was ascertained 
that some of the specimens were currency and some money, and that they 
belonged to two separate series. Their relations to each other were ascertained, 
and also to the currencies of the European and Oriental nations with whom 
the Malays of the Peninsula had come in contact. The mint profit in some 
instances, and in other instances the actual profit European governments and 
mercantile authorities, and even native traders, had made in recorded transac- 
tions of the past, was found out. The origin of the British, Dutch, and 
Portuguese money, evolved for trading with the Malays, was disclosed, and 
several interesting historical discoveries were made; as, for instance, the 
explanation of the coins still remaining in museums and issued in 1510 by the 
