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The quantity of such commodities, therefore, remaining the same,

or nearly the same, while the competition to purchase them is

continually increasing, their price may rise to any degree of

extravagance, and seems not to be limited by any certain

boundary. If woodcocks should become so fashionable as to sell

for twenty guineas a-piece, no effort of human industry could

increase the number of those brought to market, much beyond what

it is at present. The high price paid by the Romans, in the time

of their greatest grandeur, for rare birds and fishes, may in

this manner easily be accounted for. These prices were not the

effects of the low value of silver in those times, but of the

high value of such rarities and curiosities as human industry

could not multiply at pleasure. The real value of silver was

higher at Rome, for sometime before, and after the fall of the

republic, than it is through the greater part of Europe at

present.