Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/185

 CHAPTER VIII.

Ordiar ex minimis.

''Carm. de ponderibus.''

We have seen that the Chinese system of weights is based upon natural seeds of plants, and we have actually found the wild hillsmen of Annam and Laos weighing their gold dust by grains of maize and rice. But it may be urged by the advocates of a Babylonian scientific origin based on the one-fifth of the cube of the royal ell, which in turn is based upon the sun's apparent diameter, that the Chinese names of weights are merely conventional terms taken from the name of certain seeds, and on the other hand that the mere fact that a very barbarous people like the Bahnars of Annam weigh their gold dust by grains of rice is no evidence that people in a higher stage of culture were content with such rude metric standards. I propose to show in this chapter that it has been the actual practice of peoples as far advanced in civilization as the ancient Greeks or Italians, to employ seeds as weights down to the present day in Asia, that it was the general practice in the middle ages, that it was likewise the practice of the Romans of the empire, of the Greeks, and finally that such too was the practice of the Assyrians themselves at a period long before the bronze Lion weights were ever cast, or the stone Duck weights were carved. If I succeed in proving this proposition, the doctrine that the art of weighing was scientific must give place to the contention that it was purely empirical.