tchet.

Improbable and grotesque as this affiliation sounds at first hearing,
it is, nevertheless, about as certain as any other fact in
anthropological science--which isn't, perhaps, saying a great deal. The
familiar little brass cash, with the square hole for stringing them
together on a thread in the centre, well known to the frequenter of
minor provincial museums, are, strange to say, the lineal descendants,
in unbroken order, of the bronze axe of remote Celestial ancestors.
From the regular hatchet to the modern coin one can trace a distinct,
if somewhat broken, succession, so that it is impossible to say where
the one leaves off and the other begins--where the implement merges
into the medium of exchange, and settles down finally into the root of
all evil.

Here is how this curious pedigree first worked itself out. In early
times, before coin was invented, barter was usually conducted between
producer and consumer with metal implements, as it still is in Central
Africa at the present day with Venetian glass beads and rolls of red
calico. Payments were all made in kind, and bronze was the commonest
form of specie. A gentleman desirous of effecting purchases in foreign
parts went about the world with a number of bronze axes in his pocket
(or its substitute), which he exchanged for other goods with the native
traffickers in the country where he did his primitive business. At
first, the early Chinese in that unsophisticated age were content to
use real hatchets for this commercial purpose; but, after a time, with
the profound mercantile instinct of their race, it occurred to some of
them that when a man wanted half a hatchet's worth of goods he might as
well pay for them with half a hatchet. Still, as it would be a pity to
spoil a good working implement by cutting it in two, the worthy Ah Sin
ingeniously compromised the matter by making thin hatchets, of the
usual size and shape, but far too slender for practical usage. By so
doing he invented coin: and, what is more, he invented it far earlier
than the rival claimants to that proud distinction, the Lydians, whose
electrum staters were first struck in the seventh century, B.C. But,
according to Professor Terrien de la Couperie, some of the fancy
Chinese hatchets which we still retain date back as far as the year
1000 (a good round number), and are so thin that they could only have
been intended to possess exchange value. And when a distinguished
Sinologist gives us