316 Science of Money, [July? 



invented in coin, which every one consented voluntarily to 

 take in exchange for the goods he had to sell, because he 

 knew that when he himself required to buy he would be able 

 to get other property of the same value as that he had sold 

 for coin." If this be an accurate or probable account of the 

 origin of our subject, there can be no Science of Money. 

 Our chief question then is : Did money come into existence 

 by antecedent design or otherwise ? 



To aid our illustration, let us take a few early historical data 

 on the subject. They will present money to us in a simpler 

 condition than at present, and in a state that may help us in 

 tracing it still nearer its source. In early Greece iron was 

 used as money ; in early Rome rings of copper. Silver 

 money came subsequently to Greece in her trading with 

 Asia, along with the weights and measures and other com- 

 mercial facilities of the teeming and busy East. Gold money 

 came generally at a later time. The Greek trading commu- 

 nities — Argos, yEgina, Athens — readily adopted the silver ; 

 the interior and non-trading, as Sparta, clung longer to the 

 iron. Lastly, the Lybians were reputed to have invented 

 money — a question that will be estimated further on. 



This rude money of early Europe, then, has developed into 

 the vast and highly artistic money system of after times, con- 

 currently with the great commerce of these times. But this 

 advance has not been uniform over the world ; and that world 

 still presents to us even to-day, among Australian tribes, for 

 instance, as well as other populations, a primitivism as free 

 from industry in the commercial sense, from exchange of 

 products and from money, as any that preceded Greece 

 or Rome. We have ascended a step when, quitting our 

 modern Australian, we come to Mr. Brookes's paterfamilias 

 of Borneo, who, gathering a load of bees'-wax, perambu- 

 lates the country till he has exchanged it for other 

 things his household needs. But our Bornean showed rea- 

 diness to advance when our countrymen, and others from 

 without, introduced him to larger trading and the use of 

 money. Commerce and civilisation seem born of such 

 mutual intercourse. The steps of human progress are gene- 

 rally taken with a difference due to places and circumstances, 

 and by intercourse these differences are mutually appro- 

 priated towards further progress. Civilisation, therefore, 

 with its indispensable commerce, has chiefly flourished along 

 the world's great streams of human intercourse, shaped, as 

 these are perhaps chiefly, by physical, and climatic features. 

 The peoples who have remained outside, shunted from the 

 active life of the world, have more or less preserved to us 



