ABSTRACT
Mr. A. L. Burns’ use of Gresham’s Law as an illustration provides a good example for showing how useful it would be for the historian if he examined what Gresham’s Law amounts to as a theoretical statement and not merely as an empirical generalisation. The historian who knows of Gresham’s Law merely as an empirical proposition might well be puzzled when he finds that, after good and bad coins had been circulating concurrently for decades without a noticeable deterioration in the average quality, at one point of time the good coins had suddenly begun to grow very scarce. Like most of the theory which is likely to be useful to the historian, it is only very simple and elementary theory which is required; and the usual conception of Gresham’s Law is a very good illustration of how theory may and how it will not help the historian.
