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 highest unit in the Irish system, the _cumhal_, which represented the value of three cows or three ounces of silver, was neither more nor less than an _ancilla_ (or ordinary _slave-woman_): the tenfold of this _tael_ was the highest unit employed for either gold or silver by the most advanced peoples in this region, and is very well known as the _nên_ or bar. All other goods were long appraised by measurement, the lowest unit of capacity being the cocoa-nut or the joint of the bamboo, the former known certainly to the Cambodians, the latter to the Chinese, whilst both are equally familiar to the Malays. The weight of the contents of the bamboo or cocoa-nut was presently taken, the standard employed being the _tael_, or highest unit yet employed for the precious metals. The weight of the contents would depend on the nature of the substance or liquid employed, for instance rice or some other kind of grain, or water. Thus the Chinese equate their catty to 16 taels; no doubt too convention came in at a later stage, and even though the contents might not actually weigh 16 taels, it was found convenient for practical purposes to regard some suitable multiple of the tael, such as 16, as the legal weight of the catty. A similar process was carried out in the case of the _picul_ in the more advanced communities; a _load_ was equated to the most convenient multiple of the catty, and as it was found that 100 catties gave a sufficiently near approximation to the ordinary load which a man could carry on his back, 100 catties were made the legal contents of the _picul_ of trade.