and as possibly the gourd itself under its name of Kyathos formed the lowest unit of capacity among the Greeks. We saw clearly that the catty has never become a weight-unit for precious metals among the Chinese, Annamites or Cambodians; the first named never having used any higher unit for such purpose than a bar of ten taels, and at the present day for the most part contenting themselves with the tael or ounce, whilst the two latter still use the nên or bar with its subdivisions into 10 denhs, or in other words, use as their highest monetary unit the tenfold of the tael or ounce. We likewise found that in Annam among the less advanced peoples there was considerable evidence to show that the bat or tical was originally the highest unit used for gold, and that this name bat was applied to weights of different amount; thus the chi which in commercial weight is only the quarter of a bat, is itself called the gold bat. The bat itself was the third of the tael. We also found the bar of silver, the common monetary unit at the present moment, equated to the buffalo, the common unit of barter among the Bahnars, and finally we had a distinct tradition that not so long ago the wild tribesmen who win the gold dust from the sands of their native brooks did not as yet even weigh the metal by means of the grains of maize which are now employed, but that they measured off a small rod of gold an inch long as the equivalent of a buffalo.
From all these facts it seems easy to trace the history of the development of weight standards in Further Asia; the first stage in trafficking in gold seems to be one purely by measure, then comes that of weighing by means of grains of corn, the weight in gold of one or more grains of corn being taken in the ordinary way of barter like other articles in the common scale of exchange. A multiple of the higher unit the bat was formed, possibly based on the slave as the multiple of the buffalo. This multiple is threefold of the bat, in that respect offering a strange analogy to the gold talent of Sicily, Magna Graecia, and Macedonia, which is the threefold of the Homeric ox-unit, and which, as I have conjectured, may have represented the value of a slave, as we certainly know as a fact that the