of its value. Large payments, moreover, have to be made to the State
by those who rent its lands or purchase the various articles of which
it possesses a monopoly; or, again, in return for the services it
undertakes, as lighting roads and supplying water to districts
dependent on a distant source. Great care is taken to keep the issue
of these notes within safe limits; and as a matter of fact they are
rather more valuable than the land they represent, and are in
consequence seldom presented for redemption therein. To provide
against the possibility of such an over-issue as might exhaust the
area of standard land at command of the State, it is enacted that,
failing this, the holder may select his portion of State domain
wherever he pleases, at twelve years' purchase of the rental; but in
point of fact these provisions are theoretically rather than
practically important, since not one note in a hundred is ever
redeemed or paid off. The "square measure," upon which the coinage, if
I may so call it is based, following exactly the measure of length,
each larger area in the ascending scale represents 144 times that
below it. Thus the _styly_ being a little more than a foot, the
_steely_ is about 13 feet, or one-twelfth of the _staly_; but the
_steelta_ (or square steely) is 1/144th part of the _stalta_. The
_stolta_, again, is about 600 yards square, or 360,000 square yards,
144 times the _stalta_. The highest note, so to speak, in circulation
represents this last area; but all calculations are made in _staltau_,
or twelfths thereof. The _stalta_ will purchase about six ounces of
gold. Notes are issued for the third, fourth, and twelfth parts of
this: values smaller than the latter are represented by a token
coinage of square medals composed of an alloy in which gold and silver
respectively are the principal elements. The lowest coin is worth
about threepence of English money.

Stopping at the largest public building in the city, a central hexagon
with a number of smaller hexagons rising around it, we entered one of
the latter, each side of which might be some 30 feet in length and 15
in height. Here were ranged a large number of instruments on the
principle of the voice-writer, but conveying the sound to a vast
distance along electric wires into one which reverses the
voice-recording process, and repeats the vocal sound itself. Through
one of these, after exchanging a few words with one of the officials
in charge of them,