Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/247

 blue glass which according to Lepsius and Helbig is the mock lapis lazuli which the Egyptians were so fond of making in imitation of the rare and costly real stone which had to be brought from Tartary. Granting then for the sake of argument that the Homeric Talent was a standard introduced into Greece from Egypt at a very early period, it by no means follows that this standard has had a scientific origin. The Greeks it will be noticed found it necessary in taking over this standard to equate it to their primitive barter system. If then the process of human development is such that the Greeks, who above all people shewed the most extraordinary power of acquiring civilization, found it necessary even when presented with a ready made standard for metallic currency, to bring it into harmony with their immemorial system of appraising values by means of the cow, there is certainly a strong presumption that the people from whom they derived that metallic standard had not themselves obtained it by any mathematical process.

We can hardly doubt that mankind first obtained empirically the art of weighing, and that it was only at a later period that mathematics were called in to fix scientifically the standards obtained by the older and cruder method. Such is the function of mathematics still. Thus Professor Cayley observed (in his address at Stockport), "I said I would speak to you not of the utility of mathematics in any of the questions of common life or of physical science, but rather of the obligations of mathematics to these different subjects. The consideration which thus presents itself is in a great measure that of the history of the development of the different branches of mathematical science in connection with the older physical sciences, Astronomy and Mechanics. The mathematical theory is in the first instance suggested by some question of common life or of physical science, is pursued and studied quite independently thereof, and perhaps after a long interval comes in contact with it or with quite a different question ."

If such then is the part played by mathematics in an age when even the mathematician has come to the aid of the hang-*