Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/208

 the primitive mind. The difficulty experienced by savages in counting beyond 3 or 4 is met by them by the use of counters. We are all familiar with the use of pebbles or small stones among the Greeks and Romans. Our own word calculate is simply an adaptation of the Latin calculare to count by pebbles (calculi). Some nations, probably all, have been unable to form abstract names for their numerals, and the name of the concrete object which they habitually employed as a counter has become firmly embedded as a suffix in the names of their numerals. Thus the Aztec numerals end in tetl, a pebble, because they employed small stones as counters. Similarly the Malays whom we found weighing gold by means of grains of padi employ that word as a numeral suffix, because they employed grains of rice for their calculations or, to speak more accurately, seminations. In the case of this people we find coincident the most primitive forms of numeration and of weighing, both processes being carried on by means of the same simple instrument, which Nature put ready to hand in the corn which formed their daily sustenance.

If any one still maintains that the Indian Islander or Tapak of Annam learned the art of weighing by grains from the Chinese, and would maintain that the latter either invented for themselves or borrowed from Babylonia a scientifically devised weight system, I will go a step further and try to produce some evidence of the process by which weight standards are arrived at, by seeking instances in a region so isolated as to be beyond the reach of all suspicion of having borrowed from Babylon.

From what I have said above, we cannot expect to find any such community in the Old World. The New World on the other hand supplies us with what we desire. When the Spaniards under Cortes, conquered the Aztecs of Mexico, that people, although in a high state of civilization, had as yet no system of weights. In consequence of this want the Spaniards experienced some difficulty in the division of the treasure, until they supplied the deficiency with weights and scales of their own manufacture. There was a vast treasure of gold, which metal, found on the surface or gleaned from the