of all the articles of daily life it is easy to estimate how many hoes any even of their more costly possessions is worth. Thus the full-grown buffalo = 7 jars = 28 _muks_ = 280 hoes, or about £1. 3_s._ 4_d._ of our money. All these transactions require no use of weights, being reckoned by bulk or tale. But now comes the most interesting feature for us, a people in the complete stage of barter, but who actually possess, work and traffic in gold. In all the streams on the side next Laos the wild people wash gold, men, women and children all alike joining in this laborious industry, and employ as ‘cradles’ little baskets made of bamboo. The gold is sold in dust at the _rate of the weight in gold of one grain of maize for one hoe_. Here then we have finally run to ground one of the principal objects of our quest. We have a primitive people, who carry on all their trade by means of barter, who have no currency in the precious metals, but who employ as their most general unit of small value the iron hoe. They are found to weigh one thing and one only, namely gold, and for that purpose they do not employ any weight standard borrowed from China or Annam, but equate a certain amount of gold to the unit of barter, and then fix as a constant that amount of gold by balancing it against a grain of the corn that forms one of the chief staples of their subsistence. Nature herself has supplied man with weights of admirable exactitude ready to his hand in the natural seeds of plants, and as soon as he finds out the need of determining with great care the precious substance which he has to win with toil and hardship from the stream, he takes the proffered means and fashions for himself a balance and weights.