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. If any one still maintains that the Indian Islander or Tapak of Annam learned the art of weighing by grains from the Chinese, and would maintain that the latter either invented for themselves or borrowed from Babylonia a scientifically devised weight system, I will go a step further and try to produce some evidence of the process by which weight standards are arrived at, by seeking instances in a region so isolated as to be beyond the reach of all suspicion of having borrowed from Babylon.