Madras, twenty-four fanams or eight talis being equal to the Spanish dollar, which is always valued in the English settlements at five shillings.”
He adds that copper is sold by weight (picul), and that tin, which was accidentally discovered in 1710 by the burning of a house, is exported for the most part in small pieces or cakes called tampangs, sometimes in slabs (p. 172), and furthermore they purchase bar iron by measurement instead of by weight (p. 176).
Several points of great importance are to be noticed in the foregoing statements. Firstly, that whilst for foreign trade with the Chinese they employ the Chinese weight, which we know always by its Malay name of picul, a well-defined weight standard of 133⅓ lbs. avoirdupois, they had evidently a native unit of weight, their own picul, which simply means and actually was as much as a man can carry on his back, and which, as we saw, rarely exceeds 80 lbs. avoirdupois. This seems to give us an insight into the manner in which the most primitive highest weight unit is arrived at. A man’s load is one of those natural standards which will vary according to race and climate, and the conditions under which the load has to be borne. Thus, the average weight of the load borne by a dock porter who has to endure the strain for only some few yards, will of course be far higher than that carried by the porters of travellers in Central Africa, where the load has to be borne day after day on a march of several hundred, or a thousand miles. Thus in the case of the Madis, a pure negro tribe, the average load seems to be about 50 pounds, which they can carry “20 miles a day for eight or ten consecutive days without shewing any signs of distress4.” The Chinese, the superiors in science of all Eastern Asia, have carefully adjusted this “load,” and it makes, as we have seen above, their highest weight unit. Its particular amount is probably due to the fact that, having carefully fixed the weight of the smaller units, the candarin, the mace, the liung or tael, and the catty, their pound, they simply took the hundredfold of the chang or catty as the standard for their highest unit, and thus that which at an earlier stage was just as vague and fluctuating as the picul,