further step has been made, and that the commercial system of the catty and _picul_ has been called into service for the weighing of silver. In Java, whilst gold and silver are weighed by units of small size, copper is sold by the _picul_. It seems to me not unreasonable to suppose that the origin of the talent has been analogous to that of the _picul_. There is certainly nothing in either the Hebrew _kikkar_ or the Greek _talanton_ to imply in the slightest degree that they represented a numerical multiple of the mina. The Greek word means simply a _weight_, whilst the Hebrew seems to mean nothing more than a _round mass_ or _cake_ of anything, whether applied to a tract of country, as the region round the Jordan (as in Nehemiah vii. 28), or a loaf of bread (Exodus xxix. 23; 1 Samuel ii. 36). For as the talent was only introduced into the Hebrew system at a late period the term was probably applied to a _cake_ or _pig_ of copper or iron the weight of the ordinary _load_. That there was a direct connection between the kikkar and a man’s _load_ seems implied by the fact that Naaman “bound _two_ talents of silver in _two_ bags, with two changes of garments, and laid _them_ upon _two_ of his servants; and they bare _them_ before him” (2 Kings v. 23). As we find Naaman asking Elisha for “two mules’ burden of earth” (v. 17) it is at least certain that the Semites regularly estimated bulky weights by some kind of _load_. We saw above that in Assyrian the same ideogram stands for _tribute_ and _talent_. If a _load_ of corn was the regular unit for tribute, the use of a single ideogram may be explained. In the case of _talanton_ we have no difficulty in directly regarding it as a _load_, whilst with _kikkar_ it is not difficult to see how easy it was for the meaning of a _load_ of a certain weight to spring from the earlier meaning of the word. Its use as a loaf is interesting in connection with the fact noted on p. 159 that in Annam the largest unit in use for gold and silver is called a _loaf_.