Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/139

 without danger infer that they did not use weight for any cereals they may have cultivated. Therefore we may, with a good deal of probability, conclude that we have got a people who had already a knowledge of the art of weighing before they were acquainted with either silver or iron, and that this people used the scales for gold and nothing else. This, taken in connection with the fact that in Homer, although silver is known, the weighing of metals is confined to gold, leads us irresistibly to conclude that gold was the first of all substances to be weighed, or, to put it in a different way, the art of weighing was invented for gold.