Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/204

 studied, amongst the Tapaks of Annam and the Malays of Sumatra, the art of weighing in its earliest infancy; only one product, gold, as yet being weighed, and the weight unit employed for it being a grain of rice or maize. We found that this smallest natural unit of gold was amongst the Bahnars equated to the smallest unit of barter in use among them, the hoe, whilst their highest unit was the buffalo; and that by a simple process based on the known relation existing in value between the hoe, the muk, the jar, and the buffalo, there was no difficulty in arriving empirically at the exact value in gold of a buffalo. We found also that the two higher units of weight the picul, and the catty, which in almost every case were found to be confined to the ordinary merchandise, were beyond reasonable doubt not originally multiples of the lower the tael, but were really natural units obtained by a totally different process; the picul being the amount which an average man can conveniently carry on his back, the catty, as seen especially in the case of the neal of Cambodia, being nothing more than the cocoa-nut shell used as the ordinary measure of capacity, as a gourd of a certain kind is employed at Zanzibar, as the hen's egg was employed by the Hebrews and also by the ancient Irish, as the cochlea or mussel shell was taken by the Romans as the basis of their measures of capacity, and as possibly the gourd itself under its name of Kyathos formed the lowest unit of capacity among the Greeks. We saw clearly that the catty has never become a weight-unit for precious metals among the Chinese, Annamites or Cambodians; the first named never having used any higher unit for such purpose than a bar of ten taels, and at the present day for the most part contenting themselves with the tael or ounce, whilst the two latter still use the nên or bar with its subdivisions into 10 denhs, or in other words, use as their highest monetary unit the tenfold of the tael or ounce. We likewise found that in Annam among the less advanced peoples there was considerable evidence to show that the bat or tical was originally the highest unit used for gold, and that this name bat was applied to weights of different amount; thus the chi which in commercial weight is only the quarter of a bat, is itself called the gold bat. The bat itself was the third