The book of Mikhail Parfenovich Zablotsky-Desyatovsky (1816-1858), statistics and metrologist, in a certain sense became a frontier in the process of the transition of domestic numismatic science from the quantitative accumulation of facts to their qualitative understanding. It is devoted to a review of monetary systems in Russia from the first money (leather) to the beginning of the reign of Tsar Peter I. The author's focus is not on describing a separate coin as such, but on studying the Russian monetary system, summarizing data on its weight, denomination ratio, etc. This approach was largely facilitated by the activities of M.P. Zablotsky as a statistician who knew how to generalize quantitative material.