Before ever they had _Awle blades_ from _Europe_, they made shift to bore this their shell money with stone, and so fell their trees with stone set in a wooden staff, and used wooden _howes_: which some old & poore women (fearfull to leave the old tradition) use to this day. They hang these strings of money about their necks and wrists, as also upon the necks and wrists of their wives and children." Trumbull (pp. 140, 175, _ut supra_) says that the Poquaûhock was the _Venus mercenaria_, the round clam, or quahaug; the Meteaûhock was probably the _Pyrula carica_ or _P. canaliculata_, which have retained the name of "periwinkle" on the coast of New England. (The two latter species are also known as _Fulgur carica_ and _Scycotypus canaliculata_.) From these shells were cut beads of cylindrical shape, through which holes were drilled; these beads were then strung upon cords, or the sinews of animals, and, when woven into plaits about as broad as the hand, made wampum "belts." In early times, various articles were used as substitutes for the shell beads--colored sticks of wood, porcupine quills, and glass or porcelain beads, brought from Europe by the traders. The early traders readily adopted wampum as a medium of exchange in their transactions with the Indians, in both purchase and sale. Thus it "quickly became a standard of values, the currency of the colonists to a great extent in their transactions with each other, and even a legal tender." In Massachusetts, "wampampeag" was legal tender (Act of 1648) for all debts less than forty shillings, "except county rates to the treasurer,"--the white at eight for a penny, and the black at four for a penny. "So slow were the red men to relinquish this currency, that wampum continued to be fabricated until within fifty years in several towns of New York State (chiefly at Babylon, L. I.) to meet the demand for it by Western fur traders."--See Ingersoll's "Wampum and its History," in _American Naturalist_, vol. xvii. (1883), pp. 467-479. Beauchamp says (_N. Y. Iroquois_): "I have mentioned the lack of wampum among the early New York Iroquois, as a proof that they had not reached the sea; but it was not abundant even on the coast in prehistoric times. On early Iroquois sites it is not found, nor anything resembling it.... A few stray, prehistoric, small wampum beads might be expected low down in the Mohawk valley, but I know of none; west of this, they are absolutely unknown. When, therefore, we are told of ancient wampum belts in New York, coeval with and recording the formation of the Iroquois league, we may settle it in our minds that such do not exist and never did. The most ancient Onondaga belt is modern, and it is doubtful if any one is much over a century old."