did not the maker of the weight mentioned above inscribe it as ¾ obol, or by some other term to indicate that it was essentially regarded as a fraction of a higher denomination, and not as a multiple of a lower? But the ancient Assyrian who made the weight must plainly have regarded it in the latter light, for otherwise he would not have engraved on it 22 grains ½, actually resorting to the fraction of a grain. The only reasonable explanation of his conduct is that he was as firmly impressed with the idea that the basis of his system was the grain of corn (wheat) as were Brahmagupta, or Henry VII.’s parliament with the idea that the barley-corn and wheat-corn were the bases of their respective systems. If the objection be raised that the grains of corn were only devised in days long after the scientific fixing of weight standards, my answer is that if it was necessary to employ natural seeds as a means of determining the accuracy of scientifically obtained units, à fortiori it was necessary for mankind to have employed such seeds as their first step in the establishing of a system of weights.
No simpler idea connected with weight could have struck the primitive mind. The difficulty experienced by savages in counting beyond 3 or 4 is met by them by the use of counters. We are all familiar with the use of pebbles or small stones among the Greeks and Romans. Our own word calculate is simply an adaptation of the Latin calculare to count by pebbles (calculi). Some nations, probably all, have been unable to form abstract names for their numerals, and the name of the concrete object which they habitually employed as a counter has become firmly embedded as a suffix in the names of their numerals. Thus the Aztec numerals end in tetl, a pebble, because they employed small stones as counters. Similarly the Malays whom we found weighing gold by means of grains of padi employ that word as a numeral suffix, because they employed grains of rice for their calculations or, to speak more accurately, seminations. In the case of this people we find coincident the most primitive forms of numeration and of weighing, both processes being carried on by means of the same simple instrument, which Nature put ready to hand in the corn which formed their daily sustenance.