Practically it may be said, that there is no paper money in Spain. Notes may be taken in some of the larger cities, but in the provinces the value of a man in office’s promise to pay on paper, is not considered by the shrewd natives to be actually equal to cash; while they will readily give these notes to foreigners, they prefer for their own use the old-fashioned representatives of wealth, gold and silver, towards the smallest fraction of which they have the largest possible veneration. Accounts are usually kept in _reales de vellon_ of royal bullion; and these are subdivided into _maravedis_, the ancient coin of the Peninsula: there are minor fractions even of farthings, consisting in material of infinitesimal bits of any metals, melted church bells, old cannon, &c., with names and values unknown in our happy land, where not much is to be got for a mite; in Spain, where cheapness of earth-produce is commensurate with poverty, anything, even to an old button, goes for a _maravedí_, and we have found that in changing a dollar by way of experiment into small coppers in the market at Seville, among the multitudinous specimens of Spanish mints of all periods, Moorish and even Roman coins were to be met with, and still current. The dollar, or _Duro_, of Spain is well known all over the world, being the form under which silver has been generally exported from the Spanish colonies of South America. It is the Italian “Colonato,” so called because the arms of Spain are supported between the two pillars of Hercules. The coinage is slovenly: it is the weight of the metal, not the form, which is looked to by the Spaniard, who, like the Turk, is not so clever a workman or mechanist as devout worshipper of bullion. Ferdinand VII. continued for a long while to strike money with his father’s head, having only had the lettering altered: thus early Trajans exhibit the head of Nero. When the Cortes entered Madrid after the Duke’s victory at Salamanca, they patriotically prohibited the currency of all coins bearing the head of the intrusive Joseph; yet his dollars being chiefly made out of stolen church plate, gilt and ungilt, were, although those of an usurper, intrinsically worth more than the _legitimate_ duro: this was a too severe test for the loyalty of those whose real king and god is cash. Such a decree was worthy of senators who were busier employed in expelling French tropes from their dictionary than French troops from their country. The wiser Chinese take Ferdinand’s and Joseph’s dollars alike, calling them both “devil’s head” money. These bad prejudices against good coin have now given way to the march of intellect; nay, the five-franc piece with Louis-Philippe’s clever head on it bids fair to oust the pillared _Duro_. The silver of the mines of Murcia is exported to France, where it is coined, and sent back in the manufactured shape. France thus gains a handsome per centage, and habituates the people to her image of power, which comes