Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 81.djvu/529

Rh "globe dollar" of Charles III. exhibited between the pillars two globes representing the old and new worlds as subject to Spain. A Spanish banner or a scroll around the pillars of Hercules was claimed to be the origin of the dollar mark. The theory supposes that the mark stamped on the coins was copied into commercial documents. No embarrassments were experienced from the fact that no manuscripts

are known which show in writing the imitation of the pillars and scroll. On the contrary, the imaginative historian mounted his Pegasus and pranced into antiquity for revelations still more startling. "The device of the two pillars was stamped upon the coins" of the people who "built Tyre and Carthage"; the Hebrews had "traditions of the pillars of Jachin and Boaz in Solomon's Temple" "still further back in the remote ages we find the earliest known origin of the symbol in connection with the Deity. It was a type of reverence with the first people of the human race who worshipped the sun and the plains of central Asia." The author of this romance facetiously remarks, "from thence the descent of the symbol to our own time is obvious." Strange to say, the ingenious author forgot to state that this connection of the dollar mark with ancient deities accounts for the modern phrase, "the almighty dollar."

Most sober-minded thinkers have been inclined to connect the dollar