Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/184

 "The tical of gold is," it is said, "equivalent to the weight of 32 grains of a peculiar kind of rice of the country, with large grains and of a red colour, which is called ivory rice." Here we have the weighing by natural grains as before, but Aymonier adds (p. 35) that "the natives relate that gold was formerly so abundant that without weighing it people were content to measure it. A little stick of gold an inch broad and a span long was exchanged against a buffalo."

We found the Bahnars equating a small quantity of gold to their smallest unit of barter, the hoe; now we find that in the wild parts of Laos the unit of gold, before weights of natural grains were employed, was based by measurement upon the buffalo, the chief unit of barter. Thus we have found among the remote peoples of Further Asia the very method of fixing a metallic unit, which I have endeavoured to prove was that followed by the Aryan and Semitic races in arriving at that shekel of gold, which was the common standard of all the civilized peoples of the ancient world, and which was the parent of all our mediaeval and modern systems.