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98 119. I cannot tell you what the value of the piece was at this time: the sentence with which Sismondi concludes his account of it being only useful as an example of the total ignorance of the laws of currency in which many even of the best educated persons at the present day remain.

"Its value," he says always the same, "answers to eleven francs forty centimes of France."

But all that can be scientifically said of any piece of money is that it contains a given weight of a given metal. Its value in other coins, other metals, or other general produce, varies not only from day to day, but from instant to instant.

120. With this coin of Florence ought in justice to be ranked the Venetian zecchin; but of it I can only thus give you account in another place,—for I must at once go on now to tell you the first use I find recorded, as being made by the Florentines of their new money.

They pursued in the years 1253 and 1254