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The article discusses Bimetallic controversy of fifty years ago. Bimetallism thrilled people as perhaps no other controversy of the day. It was at its height in the years preceding the discovery of the Rand in 1886, a discovery which before the end of the century had robbed it of all but academic interest. In Great Britain itself it became a lively issue owing to the sharp and prolonged fall in the gold price of silver and other commodities after 1872. It gave a minister of the government Alfred Marshall the opportunity to expound before the Gold and Silver Commission of 1887-8 and the House of Commons Committee on Indian Currency (1899) not only his plan of Symmetallism, i.e., of paper based on a composite of gold and silver; but his whole theory of money and credit. In the United States, which had a great silver-producing interest, it drew from William Jennings Bryan, the democratic candidate for the American presidency in 1896, the famous challenge "Shall mankind be crucified on a cross of gold?" But all Europe was interested; and it is on the Continent that the story begins and develops.