greatly the development of the sense and habit of exact estimation of
price.

§ 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 marketability it had
before. In agricultural and pastoral communities where every one had
a share in the pasture, cattle were a fairly convenient form of money,
but in the city trade of to-day their use as money is impossible.
Thus, in a sense, different commodities compete, each trying to prove
its fitness to be a medium of trade; but only one, or two, or three at
the most, can at one time hold such a place.

While industrial changes and conditions affect the choice of money, in
turn money reacts upon the other industrial conditions. If a new and
more convenient material is found or the value of the money metal
changes to a degree that affects the generalness of its use, industry
is greatly affected. The discovery of mines in America brought into