Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/719

 NOTES AND ABSTRACTS.

The Beginnings of Currency. — An exchange of goods is always based on a comparison of their respective utihties, i. e., of their values in use to the possessor. But a comparison of values always presupposes a common measure of values. In the form of barter this common measure is implicit in the consciousness of the two parties without being represented by any material denominator. Barter is thus exchange of pos- sessions pure and simple. I exchange my grain today for your fruit, and my adze tomorrow for your knife ; that is barter. But when our daily transactions become so far complicated as to require some other article having a permanent and daily use or value for all of us, to be interposed between the grain and the fruit, between the adze and the knife, as a common measure of their values, we have set up a currency and medium of exchange. Thus all the members of our tribe have cocoanuts in varying quantity and can find a use for them every day. I want fruit and you want grain; but, instead of exchanging my grain for your fruit, I give you six pairs of cocoanuts for the fruit I want, and later on you come to me and give me five pairs of cocoanuts for the com you want. This procedure — one simple transaction at a time containing but the two factors — is uniform for peoples just beginning the use of a medium of exchange. This is simply bartering through a medium, and cocoanuts, say, are our currency. But with the progress of civilization, and with the multiplication and increasing complexity of our wants, we proceed to make those articles which most invariably stir our cupidity and sense of value by attracting to us the attention and services of others into a system of money, which thus makes everjTvhere explicit and convertible in concrete form our common mental experience of value. Thus currency becomes a common conventional symbol — usable only as a medium of exchange. As, however, commerce reaches its most complicated stages we are able to set up a system of transactions, through the help of this common denominator of value, money, in which system we balance accounts and dispense with the actual handling of the money almost altogether, it simply standing back of the transaction as a guarantee of its faithfulness. Thus, when I want fruit and you want com, instead of actually exchanging the cocoanuts or the metal money that has taken their place, we may simply set down one cocoanut or one unit of money to your credit in future transactions. This is the system of credit. — Colonel R. C. Temple, "Beginnings of Currency," in Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, August-November, 1899.

Totemisra as a Factor in the Evolution of Religion. — The place of totemism in the history of religion has lately begun to attract considerable attention. To attempt to reduce all forms of plant and animal worship to totemism, or to insist that all religious cults can be traced to it, would be narrow and inexact. But there are certain impor- tant considerations which indicate that totemism must be given much value as an ele- ment in the growth of religion, as follows :

1. It may fairly be said to be conceded, by most sociologists today who deal with the phase of the subject, that the totem-clan is the earliest distinct social organization known in the evolution of society.

2. Both social and religious aspects of evolution look to the totem-clan as the earliest society of which the members could habitually worship a common deity.

3. The immense importance of sacrificial feasts as means of binding societies together in the worship of a common divinity is widely admitted by students of anthro- pology, sociology, and theology.

4. The evidence is becoming very strong (see especially Spencer and Gillen's Native Tribes of Central Australia) to show that totemism must have been a stage in the evolution of religion. In the work above cited it is shown that in the cases observed the whole of the tribe, without regard to totem-clans, is present at the cele- bration of each and every totem rite and cult. Not only so, but any member of the

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