[Footnote 1: Le Blant, _Traité historique des Monnaies de France_, p. 184.] [Footnote 2: Dante, _Paradiso_, xix.] Matters continued to grow steadily worse until the middle of the fourteenth century. During the year 1348 there were no less than eleven variations in the value of money in France; in 1349 there were nine, in 1351 eighteen, in 1353 thirteen, and in 1355 eighteen again. In the course of a single year the value of the silver mark sprang from four to seventeen livres, and fell back again to four.[1] The practice of fixing the price of many necessary commodities must have aggravated the natural evil consequences of such fluctuations.[2] [Footnote 1: Wolowski's Introduction to Oresme's _Tractatus_, p. xxvii.] [Footnote 2: See Endemann, _Studien_, vol. ii. p. 34.] This grievance had the good result of fixing the attention of scholars on the money question. 'Under the stress of facts and of necessity,' says Brants, 'thinkers applied their minds to the details of the theory of money, which was the department of economics which, thanks to events, received the earliest illumination. Lawyers, bankers, money-changers, doctors of theology, and publicists of every kind, attached a thoroughly justifiable importance to the question of money. We are no doubt far from knowing all the treatises which saw the light in the fourteenth century upon this weighty question; but we know enough to affirm that the monetary doctrine was very developed and very far-seeing.'[1] Buridan analysed the different functions and utilities of money, and explained the different ways in which its value might be changed.[2] He did not, however, proceed to discuss the much more important question as to when the sovereign was entitled to make these alterations. This was reserved for Nicholas Oresme, who published his famous treatise about the year 1373. The merits of this work have excited the unanimous admiration of all who have studied it. Roscher says that it contains 'a theory of money, elaborated in the fourteenth century, which remains perfectly correct to-day, under the test of the principles applied in the nineteenth century, and that with a brevity, a precision, a clarity, and a simplicity of language which is a striking proof of the superior genius of its author.'[3] According to Brants, 'the treatise of Oresme is one of the first to be devoted _ex professo_ to an economic subject, and it expresses many ideas which are very just, more just than those which held the field for a long period after him, under the name of mercantilism, and more just than those which allowed of the reduction of money as if it were nothing more than a counter of exchange.'[4] 'Oresme's treatise on money,' says Macleod, 'may be justly said to stand at the head of modern economic literature. This treatise laid the foundations of monetary science, which are now accepted by all sound economists.'[5] 'Oresme's completely secular and naturalistic method of treating one