We saw that a buffalo was worth 280 hoes; it is therefore an easy task for a Bahnar to tell its worth in gold. It was equally simple for the first Aryan or Semite who framed the gold shekel standard to compute the exact amount of gold which would represent the value of an ox. But perhaps we have not reached the earliest stage of all in the development of a standard for the sale of gold. I ventured to put forward in 1887 the suggestion that the way in which the amount of gold which represented the value of a cow was first fixed approximately was by _measuring_ it in some way, as for instance by taking the amount which would fit in the palm of the hand, somewhat in the fashion that rustics measure gunpowder or shot for a gun. What was then but a mere guess may be now regarded as fairly certain. That excellent observer, M. Aymonier, notes that the Tapak tribe, who live at a distance of six days’ journey from Attopoeu, wash gold. The women wade into the streams (after having first carefully placed five flowers or five leaves at the foot of a tree close by the stream to ensure good luck). Each dips a water-tight bag into the sand at the bottom of the stream, and after a long series of rewashings and cleansings at last gets the gold dust in a state of purity[224]. The savages carry it to Attopoeu, and sell it at the rate of 9 _chi_ of gold for a _nên_ or bar of silver (= 100 _chi_). The relative value in Attopoeu is 8 _chi_ or two _bats_ of gold to one bar (= 100 _chi_) of silver, or as they express it one _tical_ of gold is changed for 12 _ticals_ of silver. “The _tical_ of gold is,” it is said, “equivalent to the weight of 32 grains of a peculiar kind of rice of the country, with large grains and of a red colour, which is called ivory rice.” Here we have the weighing by natural grains as before, but Aymonier adds (p. 35) that “the natives relate that gold was formerly so abundant that without _weighing it people were content to measure_ it. A little stick of gold an inch broad and a span long _was exchanged against a buffalo_.” We found the Bahnars equating a small quantity of gold to their smallest unit of barter, the hoe; now we find that in the wild parts of Laos the unit of gold, before weights of natural grains were employed, was based by measurement upon the buffalo, the chief unit of barter. Thus we have found among the remote peoples of Further Asia the very method of fixing a metallic unit, which I have endeavoured to prove was that followed by the Aryan and Semitic races in arriving at that shekel of gold, which was the common standard of all the civilized peoples of the ancient world, and which was the parent of all our mediaeval and modern systems. CHAPTER VIII. HOW WERE PRIMITIVE WEIGHT UNITS FIXED? Ordiar ex minimis. _Carm. de ponderibus._