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APRIL, 1899.]
DEVELOPMENT OF CURRENCY IN THE FARJAST.
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currency means the conventional weights of the exchange metals, and coins have no commercial meaning at all, except in their relation to the weights of tbe pieces of metal of which they are composed.
For the present purpose I have to insist on this last point. It is quite impossible to separate the terms for currency and Troy weight in the Far East, and the history of the development of the one is the same thing as the history of the development of the other. The most practical and the clearest way to treat the question is as one of the history of Troy woight.
I must resist the temptation of examining now the interesting and exceedingly picturesque details of the points I have thus very briefly referred to, and must pass on quickly to that · part of the subject which it is my immediate object now to discuss the development of the forms of currency in the Far East existing at the present day, and bearing an established relation to coined money or to bullion. It is the most difficult, and in an Academical sense the least interesting, but I hope that it will be conceded that it is by far the most important part of my general subject.
To make myself quite clear in the remarks that follow. I wish to explain that by "Troy weight I mean the conventional standard weights of the exchange metals, i. e., of bullion. By curiency I mean what our forefathers used to call Imaginary or Ideal Money, i.e., money of account or exchange - the means by which the commercial world is able to balance its books. By money, as differing from currency, I mean what was of old called Real Money, i.e., coins or tokens of credit convertible into property. With these remarks I will now attack our present problems, remurking merely further that the argument has to be so close, and the subject is so difficult, that they will demand the reader's close attention.
I must begin by stating that all the existirg Troy weights and currencies in India and the Far East are based on cne, and sometimes on both, of two seeds, which are known to Europeans as the feeds of the Abrus precatorius and the Adenanthera pavonina. I must ask that these two dames be borne in mind, and I will call them in my argumente the abrus and the adenanthera. The abrus is a lovely little creeper yielding a small bright red seed with a black spot on it. The adenanthera is a great deciduous pod-bearing tree, baving a Sight red seed. Conventionally the adenanthera seed is double of the abrus seed. Now, as will be presently seen, our subject literally bristles with every kind of difficulty, and here, at the very beginning, is the first. The weights represented by the two seeds have everywhere and at all times been mixed up. The terms for the abrus and its conventional representatives have been applicd to the adenanthera, and vice versa, both by native writers and European translators and reporters. As a result of the same kind of confusion of mind, whole systems of currency have been borrowed from outside by balf-civilized and ill-informed rulers and Governments, and bronght arbitrarily into existence, starting on the wrong foot, as it were. The unlimited muddle thus arising may be easily imagined, and so, too, may the amount of investigation necessary to unravel the resultant tangle. With this preliminary information as to the fundamental basis thereof, let us proceed to inqnire into the Indian Troy weight system, because I hope to show that the whole currency of the Far East is based on it, or is at least directly connected with it.
Based on the conventional abrus seed, there were in ancient, or at any rate in old, i. e., in andilated Hinda, India, two concurrent Troy scales, which, for the present purpose, I will call the literary and the popular scales. For the present purpose also, and for the sake of cleaness, I will call the abrus seed of convention in the literary scale by one of its many ancient wames, raktika, and in the popular scale by one of its many modern names, rati.
In the Indian Troy scales, then, the lower denominations represented in each case the abrue reed, but the upper denominations differed greatly; s e., in the literary scale there were 820 raktikas to the pale, and in the popular scale were 96 ratis to the told. These facta
