unterfeits, few could be ready
to take it and trading would be a costly process.

4. Durability; that is, the money-good must be easy to keep without
much loss in amount or in quality, perhaps for long periods, until it
can be passed on in trade. Few kinds of food answer very well to this
last requirement, being organic and perishable. But all four qualities
above named were pretty well embodied in primitive times in rock salt,
in rare flints and bits of copper suitable for tools and weapons,
in furs in northern countries, and in many articles of personal
adornment, such as beads, feathers, jewels, and metal ornaments.

5. Divisibility; that is, the quality in the monetary material that
permits it to be divided easily into smaller amounts and then to be
united again into larger masses at little cost and without loss in
amount or in quality. This quality is present only when the material
is quite homogeneous throughout the whole mass, a condition fulfilled
more completely by the metals than by any other goods. This quality
makes it possible to put the governmental stamp upon the money
material, and to produce pieces, some of which are exact duplicates
and some exact multiples, of others. In this manner pieces of money
are provided suitable for transactions of different magnitudes, down
to small fractional amounts. A monetary system of this kind aids
greatly the development of the sense and habit of exact estimation of
price.

Sec. 3. #Industrial changes and the forms of money#. The money use, as
has just been shown, is a resultant of a number of different motives
in men. The changing material and industrial conditions of society
change the kind of money that is used. Things that have the highest
claim to fitness for money with a people at one stage of development
have a low claim at another. The final choice of the money-good
depends on the resultant of all the advantages. Shells are used for
ornament in poor communities but cease to be so used in a higher state
of advancement, and thus their saleability ceases. Furs cease to be
generally marketable in northern climes, when the fur-bearing animals
are nearly killed off and the fur trade declines. When tobacco was the
great staple of export from Virginia, everybody was willing to take
it, and its market price was known by all. It served well then as the
chief money, but, as it ceased to be the almost exclusive product
of the province, it lost the knowableness and marke