"An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adam Smith)

successively both thought of and employed for this purpose. In the
rude ages of society, cattle are said to have been the common
instrument of commerce; and, though they must have been a most
inconvenient one, yet, in old times, we find things were frequently
valued according to the number of cattle which had been given in
exchange for them. The armour of Diomede, says Homer, cost only nine
oxen; but that of Glaucus cost a hundred oxen. Salt is said to be the
common instrument of commerce and exchanges in Abyssinia; a species of
shells in some parts of the coast of India; dried cod at 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 money.

The use of metals in this rude state was attended with two very