Very odd-looking stones and fragments of
rock are scattered over the surface of Western
Florida. In some places they have collected in
such numbers that they seem to have been
brought there. These localities are pointed out
as Indian battle-grounds, a vulgar belief prevailing
that the Indians fought battles there, and
used these stones as missiles of war; but
I observed that they had always accumulated
where there was a depression in the ground,
and that they lay in great quantities in deep
hollows. They were of all sizes, and generally
full of cells and cavities more or less rounded, as
if some softer substance had been washed out or
worn away. Others had a jagged cinder-like
appearance, and others again had only rounded
or noduled surfaces. Whether these
fragments have gone through fire or water to make
them thus, I cannot pretend to assert, but it
seems much more probable that they have been
left there by the washing away of the looser
soil, than that the proud Muskogees had
accumulated them to hurl at the rebellious Semi-
noles, or that the latter would have stood passively
in one spot without returning the compliment.

One might suppose that Secession must be
indigenous to Florida, morally as well as
geologically. The Seminoles, who seceded from
the Creeks or Muskogees, and derived their
name from the fact, are now reduced mainly to
the small remnant who have retired to the
extreme south of the peninsula, and it is a singular
coincidence, that negroes, then as now, were the
source of the family quarrels.

The sharp arrow-heads of chiselled quartz
that may be picked up in the same localities, are
more characteristic implements of Indian war-
fare, and have, no doubt, done more effective
service. We have read of their being sent from
the bow with such power as to pass through the
body of a buffalo, and one was found pierced
through a human bone, with which it had been
buried.

CASH TERMS.

Money transactions were, as all the world
knows, in the first instance matters of barter.
The word for money, which survives with us in
its adjective "pecuniary," was Latin for cattle,
and we have it in our own tongue when the law
talks of our goods and chattels. Sir John
Mandeville described as " precyous catelle" the
divine ransom of humanity. When he meant
animals, he called them bestes or bestaylle. If a
man who used cattle for cash, wanted to buy
anything with his cattle, he had to find somebody
who wanted oxen and cows, and who possessed
also, and was willing to part with, that which he
himself happened to want. If a lady now went
shopping in Regent-street with several droves
of oxen behind her carriage, instead of gold in
her purse, she would find some difficulty in
getting a silk dress for a bullock. And if the
good old system still prevailed, great would be
the confusion among cashiers in the shops.
Fancy them giving change out of an ox, in
sheep and pigs, while Lady Arabella, having
nothing smaller than a fat pig, which she
pays for a pair of gloves, looks with dismay at
the five cocks and eleven tumbler pigeons offered
her as change. What a Noah's ark of a cashbox
it would be that contained a day's ready
money in a house of business carried on under
such difficulties! Money all alive must everywhere
have soon gone out of fashion. There
must be something that could really be put in a
box and kept; for that, indeed, is what cash
means. It is caisse, the money-chest, under
which head French book-keepers enter the money
actually paid in. In the islands of the Southern
Ocean, they take red feathers as cash; in Africa,
cowries, of which a sackful represents but little
money; and elsewhere they take gold aud silver
valued by their weight, as commodities rare
enough to have an intrinsic value. A small bit
of gold would equal in worth as much corn or
other bulky stuff needed by men, and gold would
cast into lumps easily carried about and
transferred, and therefore very readily received in
barter. But then there was a difficulty. Gold
and silver varied much in degrees of fineness.
Before taking a mere lump of gold in exchange
the receiver had to weigh it and to test it. And
so in very remote days it was found that an
official stamp set on each bit of metal by supreme
authority was the best way of giving such
immediate assurance of its weight and purity as
would enable any one to receive it with
confidence as of a determined value. The stamping
is expressed in the word coin. Some tell us
that Kauna means, in Arabic, to hammer, forge,
or stamp, and that from the Arabs in Spain
came the Spanish acunar, to stamp or coin
money. But the source of the word is probably
not more remote than the Latin cuneus, or
wedge, with which the stamping was effected.
Everywhere the right coinage has been vested
in the sovereign, who claims also the right of
determining the value at which each of his pieces
shall be current. Now-a-days, in a great
commercial country, gold and silver coinage must
have an actual value answering to its professed
value, or the hands of merchants will be tied.
Formerly, kings who were short of cash made
money by diluting the coinage, as a dishonest
publican makes money by diluting and doctoring
his beer and gin.

Blackstone held that the Sovereign of England
has no lawful right to do that. The sovereign
settles the weight, alloy, and value of
coinage by indenture with the Master of the
Mint, and may proclaim any foreign money to be
current in the kingdom. But the royal power
to assign nominal values, is at this day, with
general consent, exercised in the case of our
new bronze coinage, in which the pieces are not,
like the old copper pennies and halfpennies, fair
pennyworths and halfpennyworths of the metal
used. In Sir Edward Coke's time, no copper
money was known. That—except its use for a
short time, as well as gold or silver, in the later