weights, and also by means of grains of rice, even down so low as one single grain—“Vary vray venty,” one plump grain, valued at the seven hundred and twentieth part of a dollar”20. The grain of rice therefore weighs ⁵⁄₉ gr. troy (·036 gram). As gold is not found in Madagascar21 the natives could not weigh it first of all things; but they have carried out the principle of taking silver, the most precious article they possessed, as the first object to be weighed.
In this chapter, therefore, we have sought the method by which weight standards are fixed among primitive and semi-civilized peoples; we have studied the system or systems of China, Cochin-China, Cambodia, Laos and the great Islands of the Indian Ocean. Everywhere we have received the self-same answer, everywhere the lowest unit is nothing more than a natural seed or grain. We found in two places in the area 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,