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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[APRIL, 1899.
an effort to give practical effect to the conventional denominations of their Troy weight and currency, and thus have all the three subjects of Troy weight, currenoy and coinage, been always quite inextricably mixed up. It is much the same in India, and the further one takes the inquiry back, the more do the terms for Troy weight and currency and coinage become synonymous, and at no time, even up to the present day, have they become completely separated. So much is this the case, that in tracing ont elsewhere, ante, Vol. XXVII, pp. 63 ff. and 85 ff., the history of the Indian terms for bullion weights, I had to include those for money. The only difference between the two sets of scales lies in this, that where money is mentioned, the question of alloy influences the rates at which one denomination is compared with another. To give a concrete example. In South India the number of fanams to a pagoda is a conventional proportion in a statement of Troy weights, but the rumber of fanams to a pagoda will vary according to the alloy in any particular sort of fanam or pagoda in a statement of current money..
There is only one more point that I will briefly touch upon. At first, among semi-civilized or early civilized nations, we find that exchange was manipulated merely that profit might be made by the Courts and the officials out of the peoples they always misgoverned. It begins with a system of out-going and in-coming measures. The profit was the difference between the size of the measures employed for weighing in and weighing out the same goods. It is a most interesting and instructive study to watch the effects of this. Where there was political power the difference was as great as oppression dare go. Where there was no political power the difference was fair enough, and was what we should now call “cover," just sufficient to compensate for risk, maintenance, incidental expenses and charges. .
Exchange is next geen in the buying of the medium of one place with the medium of another, the profit or loss in the transaction arising solely out of the difference in the quality of the metal itself, nearly always silver, and the quantity temporarily present in the two places with reference to the quantity of purchasable merchandize. This class of exchange involved the risk and expense of transporting bollion from place to place. Communications, both in frequency and safety, had to be vastly improved before exchange by means of documents representing the medium, such as Bills of Exchange as we now have them, to say nothing of telegraphic transfers, could be brought into play. .
Well, at first the general scales we have been carefully examining were kept alive so long, so persistently, and so widely by the Courts and the officials for their purposes, and the enormous mass of local variations thereon were created by the merchants and producers for their purposes : by the former for profits out of general, and by the latter for profits out of local, cxchange, as they anderstood it. Then when the Europeans came in and created the internal commercial scale, the trading capital, indeed, was, as now, found in Europe, but the merchant adventurers, as they were then called, bad no control over exchange whatever; and their object accordingly was to ascertain firstly, the most stable medium of exchange, and secondly, a common measure for it. The medium was, as all the world knows, silver, and the common measure the international commercial scale already explained.
CORRESPONDENCE.
PROPER NAMES IN THE THANA DISTRICT. converted to Christianity, and some of whom TO THE EDITOR OF THE " INDIAN ANTIQUARY."
have even the same surnames as Konkanastha SIR, - In turning over the pages of Vol. XII. Brahmans, are named and married by the Padre. of this Journal, a volume I had not seen before, There is nothing peculiar about this. But many I read on p. 259, with no little interest the follow of them have names given them from the days on ing, under the above heading :-"The Agris, which they are born. The name Soma, for Kolis, MAļis and other castes at Waski (Bassein) instance, is given to one born on a Monday," and adjoining places, who, it is said, are natives etc., etc.
