fixing the higher standard, as for instance in the adjustment of the English bushel in the reign of Henry VII., the reader will feel that M. Aurès has simply inverted the true order of events, and that as we found the natives of Annam and the Malays of the Indian Archipelago making their first essay in weighing by means of a grain of maize, or rice, or padi, so the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia made their first beginning, and as we have found everywhere that gold, the most precious of objects, was the first thing to be weighed, and as it only existed in small quantities, thus requiring but a very small unit of weight, so the Assyrians likewise began to weigh gold first of all, employing the natural seeds of corn, and only in process of time arrived at higher units by multiplying the smaller.
To all the evidence collected from Asia and Europe we can likewise add a fact of great importance from Africa. We saw that it was highly probable that the Carthaginians traded for gold to the West Coast of Africa, and beyond all reasonable doubt the natives of the Gold Coast have for ages been acquainted with that metal. Now it can be proved that these peoples, whilst employing no weights for any other mercantile transaction, used the seeds of certain plants for weighing their gold; thus Bosman writing two centuries ago says, “Having treated of gold at large, I am now obliged to say something concerning the gold weights, which are either pounds, marks, ounces or angels.... We use here another kind of weights which are a sort of beans, the least of which are red spotted with black and called Dambas; twenty-four of them amount to an angel, and each of them is reckoned two stiver weights; the white beans with black spots or those entirely black are heavier and accounted four stiver weights: these they usually call Tacoes, but there are some which weigh half or a whole gilder, but are not esteemed certain weights, but used at pleasure and often become instruments of fraud. Several have believed that the negroes only used wooden weights, but that is a mistake; all of them have cast weights either of copper or tin, which though divided or adjusted in a manner quite different to ours; yet upon reduction agree exactly with them17”.