Surprisingly large is the amount of bank deposits in all the leading commercial nations of the world. The average public and private deposits of the Bank of England, on which no current interest is paid by the Bank, amounts to about £40,000,000 all the time. The ten joint-stock banks of London carry about £80,000,000 in private deposits, of which those to remain some time _draw_ an interest, but those lodged on current accounts and on call _draw_ none. Scotland has carried deposit-banking further and to greater advantage than any other country in the world. There are now no private banks in Scotland, but the ten joint-stock banks with their numerous branches scattered to every village in the land hold constantly about £70,000,000 as individual deposits, on which current interest is allowed, and so the habit of keeping one's account with a banker has become universal with the people. No one thinks of keeping money to any amount in his house or about his person, and consequently house-breaking and highway robbery have almost ceased. Bankers even attend all the great fairs in the country to receive deposits and to pay off cheques. Credit in this form and in another form soon to be described treads its utmost verge in Scotland. Although in the United States the custom of keeping deposits with bankers and drawing cheques against them has not gone nearly so far as in Scotland, and not nearly so far as it will go in the immediate future, yet the aggregate of individual deposits in the national banks alone, Oct. 4, 1888, was $1,350,320,861, an increase in just seven years of 26%. _e._ Bank Discounts. The credits that are discounted by bankers may be either the promissory notes of individuals and corporations already characterized, or the Bills of Exchange soon to be characterized, but the entire function of discount is so peculiar, that the paper subjected to it ought to be enumerated in a classification of the instruments of Credit. The discounting of commercial paper is the second essential function of banking, as the buying and handling of deposits is the first; and it is more in accordance with genuine _banking_ to pass the price of the paper discounted to the seller's credit in the form of a deposit, that is, to buy one credit by creating another, than to pay the money over the counter at once, and thus to buy credits with money. Those who do the latter are called _bill-discounters_ rather than bankers, but most of our bankers do both, though there is a tendency towards the separation of the two in this country also.