18 gun-flints, 48 leaves of tobacco, } one 20 charges of gunpowder, } minkalli.  A cutlass, } A musket, from three to four minkallies.

The produce of the country and the different necessaries of life, when exchanged for gold, sold as follows:-

Common provisions for one day, the weight of one teeleekissi (a black bean, six of which make the weight of one minkalli); a chicken, one teeleekissi; a sheep, three teeleekissi; a bullock, one minkalli; a horse, from ten to seventeen minkallies.

The negroes weigh the gold in small balances, which they always carry about them.  They make no difference, in point of value, between gold dust and wrought gold.  In bartering one article for another, the person who receives the gold always weighs it with his own teeleekissi.  These beans are sometimes fraudulently soaked in shea-butter to make them heavy, and I once saw a pebble ground exactly into the form of one of them; but such practices are not very common.

Having now related the substance of what occurs to my recollection concerning the African mode of obtaining gold from the earth, and its value in barter, I proceed to the next article of which I proposed to treat—­namely, ivory.

Nothing creates a greater surprise among the negroes on the sea-coast than the eagerness displayed by the European traders to procure elephants’ teeth, it being exceedingly difficult to make them comprehend to what use it is applied.  Although they are shown knives with ivory handles, combs and toys of the same material, and are convinced that the ivory thus manufactured was originally parts of a tooth, they are not satisfied.  They suspect that this commodity is more frequently converted in Europe to purposes of far greater importance, the true nature of which is studiously concealed from them, lest the price of ivory should be enhanced.  They cannot, they say, easily persuade themselves that ships would be built and voyages undertaken to procure an article which had no other value than that of furnishing handles to knives, etc., when pieces of wood would answer the purpose equally well.

Elephants are very numerous in the interior of Africa, but they appear to be a distinct species from those found in Asia.  Blumenbach, in his figures of objects of natural history, has given good drawings of a grinder of each, and the variation is evident.  M. Cuvier also has given in the Magasin Encyclopedique a clear account of the difference between them.  As I never examined the Asiatic elephant, I have chosen rather to refer to those writers than advance this as an opinion of my own.  It has been said that the African elephant is of a less docile nature than the Asiatic, and incapable of being tamed.  The negroes certainly do not at present tame them; but when we consider that the Carthaginians had always tame elephants in their armies, and actually transported some of them to Italy in the course of the Punic wars, it seems more likely that they should have possessed the art of taming their own elephants than have submitted to the expense of bringing such vast animals from Asia.  Perhaps the barbarous practice of hunting the African elephants for the sake of their teeth has rendered them more untractable and savage than they were found to be in former times.