Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/172

 130 English grains was the equivalent to the conventional value of the animal?

If we could but discover a region in which the weight and monetary systems still in use are essentially independent of our Graeco-Asiatic standards, and where it could be proved that the monetary system is an independent native development, and where this development is of such recent date that the record has been preserved in a written document, not merely reaching us in the dim form of a tradition, blurred and broken in the long and misty space of years that lie between us and those who first shaped our system, we would undoubtedly discern more clearly the stages of its evolution.

The Chinese empire with the neighbouring peoples who have participated in its civilization afford us just the case which we desire. It will be seen from what follows that not merely the monetary system of China, but her weight system is of an origin almost wholly unaffected by Western influences.

We saw above that the earliest form of money in Greece took the form of spits or small rods of copper, no doubt of a specified size; we found in Annam that iron hoes, in mediaeval India iron formed into large-sized needles, in modern times in Central Africa pieces of iron of given dimensions, bars of iron among the Hottentots and among the peoples of the West Coast of Africa, brass rods of fixed length in the region of the Congo, and pieces of a precious wood likewise of fixed dimensions, have served or do still serve as media of exchange, and as units by which the values of other commodities are measured. In all these cases mere measure not weight, is the method of appraisement. As the archaic Greek "spit" or obolus of bronze eventually became a round bronze coin, familiar to us as Charon's fee, and in still later times under the abbreviation ob. as the accountant's symbol for a half-penny, as d. (denarius) denotes the penny, so we shall find that the common Chinese copper coins pierced with a square hole in the centre have had an almost identical history.

At the time when the Chinese made their great invasion into South-eastern Asia (214 ) they still were employing a bronze currency under the form of knives, which were 135