After what we have shown upon p. 115 concerning the methods employed in the buying and selling of corn, where it has been made clear that of all commodities corn is one of the very last to be weighed because of its bulkiness in proportion to its cheapness, I think no one will readily accept M. Aurè’s ingenious hypothesis[314]. Are we not now justified in supposing that, just as the peoples of Mesopotamia had marked their seasons and time by primitive methods, and used their fingers and hands and feet as measures long before they dreamed of scientific methods, so that likewise they had employed for weighing their gold the natural weight-unit which lay ready to their hands in the wheat-ears that crowned their plains. Let us now start with the light shekel as our unit. According to our argument it was nothing more than the amount of gold which represented the value of the cow, the unit of barter throughout all Europe, Asia and Africa, as it still is over considerable areas of both the latter continents. There is no reason for not believing that as among other people, all articles of property, utensils, weapons, clothes, ornaments and the various kinds of animals stand to one another in well-known relations of value, so the same principle was in full force among the Semites of Mesopotamia. We found that the wild tribes of Laos had a regular scale commencing with a hoe as their lowest unit, leading up through kettles and porcelain jars to the buffalo, their main unit; we also found that the weight of a grain of corn in gold was equated to a hoe, and that thus by a simple process of multiplication it was easy to ascertain the value of a buffalo in gold. The unit thus attained was kept from fluctuating, as it was known to every one how many grains of corn gave the true weight of the unit. The practical accuracy of this method of fixing monetary units has been demonstrated from the case of the Early English and Mediaeval English silver penny (p. 180). There is complete evidence to show that the light shekel system was older than the heavy system. Firstly the so-called Duck weights with their cuneiform inscriptions point to the fact that Babylonia was the special home of this system, whilst the Lion weights with their Aramaic inscriptions point to a later period, when the Assyrian Empire was in immediate touch with the merchants of Phoenicia. But, in the next place, a far more powerful argument can be drawn from the Hebrew system. In later times the heavy shekel system prevailed in Palestine, in accordance with which the maneh contained 50 heavy or double shekels of 200 grs. each. But that this maneh was simply imposed on the older light shekel system is demonstrated from the fact that when in two parallel passages articles of a certain weight of gold are mentioned, in the one the weight is given at three manehs, in the other at 300 shekels, the maneh thus being counted at 100 shekels. These 100 shekels are equal to the 50 heavy shekels of