
2 SHELL-MONEY. 
The knowledge and use of peculiar narcotics and alcoholic 
beverages by portions of the human race, both civilized and 
barbarous, unacquainted with and widely separated from each 
other is a well-known fact. Analogous to this is the use of 
some form of money or a medium in trade by isolated and 
remote tribes. 
The earlier coins of ancient Rome appear rude and gro- 
tesque when placed side by side with the exquisitely wrought 
coins and medals of Napoleon the First. But what a degree 
of civilization and knowledge of the arts do they proclaim 
when compared with the barbarism of those wild tribes of 
Africa and America, whose utter ignorance of the arts has 
led them to use as a substitute for metallic money, the shells 
of the ocean ! 
Mr. J. K. Lord, naturalist to the British North American 
Boundary Commission, during the years 1858-62, mentions 
the use of shells as money by the natives of the North-west 
coast of America, as follows: 
“It is somewhat curious that these shells (Dentalia) 
should have been employed as money by the Indians of 
North-western America ; that is, by the native tribes inhabit- 
ing Vancouver's Island, Queen Charlotte’s Island and the 
main-land coast from the Straits of Fuca to Sitka. Since 
the introduction of blankets by the Hudson Bay Company 
. the use of these shells, as a medium of purchase, has to a 
great extent died out, the blankets having become the 
money, as it were, or the means by which everything is now | 
reckoned and paid for by the savage. A slave, a canoe or a 
squaw, is worth in these days so many blankets; but it used. 
to be so many strings of Dentalia." 
.— Mr. W. H. Dall, who has recently returned from Alaska, 
and whose opportunities for observation have been ample, 
informs me that the Dentalia are used by the native Alaskans, 
and that the furs purchased of the Indians by the fur com- 
panies, or their agents and traders, are still, at least in part 


