We also saw the negroes of Central Africa employing iron made into pieces ready to be cut into two hoes, and we also found those on the West Coast of Africa and the Hottentots employing bars of iron in a raw state, as a kind of currency. We also saw one most important feature possessed by all those in common, viz. the fact that in the determination of the value of the bar, the ingot, the piece of iron made in the shape of two hoes, and the bronze knife, not weight but linear measurement based on the parts of the human body, was the method invariably employed.
We then advanced to Western Asia and Europe and found everywhere alike the weight standards fixed by means of the seeds of plants. The process likewise was made perfectly plain. We did not find the highest denomination taken as the unit and the lowest reached by a long process of subdivisions, and finally for convenience sake described as consisting of so many grains of corn, as the brilliant French savant assumes in the case of the Assyrians: on the contrary we found that the bushel of Henry VII. was reached by first fixing the weight of the penny sterling by means of 32 grains of wheat, round and dry and “taken from the midst of the ear of wheat after the old laws of the land.” Again the Irish Kelts did not say that the unga or ounce must contain so many screapalls, and each screapall so many pingiuns, but they proceeded in quite the reverse way first fixing the weight of the pingiun by eight grains of wheat. We may then well assume that such too was the process among Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Hindus. Brahmegupta, and the legislators quoted above support this view by starting always with the smallest unit. It is only when we come to the system of Babylon we are asked to reverse the process, to admit that the idea of weights began with corn, the very commodity of all others which, according to all the instances previously quoted, was the last to be valued by weight, and which even amongst ourselves at this present moment can hardly be said to be regarded as an article appraised by weight. But furthermore if the Assyrians regarded the Talent as their unit, and their lesser denominations as its subdivisions, why