Book I: Chapter 4 - Page 2

Newfoundland; tobacco in Virginia; sugar in some of our West India colonies;
hides or dressed leather in some other countries; and there is at this day a
village In Scotland, where it is not uncommon, I am told, for a workman to
carry nails instead of money to the baker's shop or the ale-house.

In all countries, however, men seem at last to have been determined by
irresistible reasons to give the preference, for this employment, to metals
above every other commodity. Metals can not only be kept with as little loss
as any other commodity, scarce any thing being less perishable than they
are, but they can likewise, without any loss, be divided into any number of
parts, as by fusion those parts can easily be re-united again; a quality
which no other equally durable commodities possess, and which, more than any
other quality, renders them fit to be the instruments of commerce and
circulation. The man who wanted to buy salt, for example, and had nothing
but cattle to give in exchange for it, must have been obliged to buy salt to
the value of a whole ox, or a whole sheep, at a time. He could seldom buy
less than this, because what he was to give for it could seldom be divided
without loss; and if he had a mind to buy more, he must, for the same
reasons, have been obliged to buy double or triple the quantity, the value,
to wit, of two or three oxen, or of two or three sheep. If, on the contrary,
instead of sheep or oxen, he had metals to give in exchange for it, he could
easily proportion the quantity of the metal to the precise quantity of the
commodity which he had immediate occasion for.

Different metals have been made use of by different nations for this
purpose. Iron was the common instrument of commerce among the ancient
Spartans, copper among the ancient Romans, and gold and silver among all
rich and commercial nations.

Those metals seem originally to have been made use of for this purpose in
rude bars, without any stamp or coinage. Thus we are told by Pliny (Plin.
Hist Nat. lib. 33, cap. 3), upon the authority of Timaeus, an ancient
historian, that, till the time of Servius Tullius, the Romans had no coined
money, but made use of unstamped bars of copper, to purchase whatever they
had occasion for. These rude bars, therefore, performed at this time the
function of rnoney.

The use of metals in this rude state was attended with two very considerable
inconveniences ; first, with the trouble of weighing, and secondly, with
that of assaying them. In the precious metals, where a small difference in
the quantity makes a great difference in the value, even the business of
weighing, with proper exactness, requires at least very accurate weights and
scales. The weighing of gold, in particular, is an operation of some