I have now to consider one more point in this connection. With the advent of the Europeans, having dealings in the ports of the whole of the Far East, there arose at once a necessity, for account purposes, for arriving at some common denominators, to which to be able to reduce the conflicting and endlessly varying standards and systems that the traders and adventurers had to confront. The necessity was met, commercial fashion, effectively and practically at a very early period in the history of the dealings, for we find the existing international commercial weight system for the Far East partially in existence, in the notes of traders of the fifteenth century, and in full swing, substantially in the form in which we now have it, as early as the days of the first voyage to the East of the Dutch East India Company in 1595-97. Perhaps it is rather late in the day to do so, but still I think it necessary to point out even now, that this international system is neither in form nor in nomenclature Chinese, but entirely Malayan in origin, being, I believe, based on the Malayan nomenclature of a commercial system of weights used in the Malayo-Chinese trade of the Middle Ages, found to be in existence by the Europeans on their arrival, and eventually modified by them to suit their own requirements.

The international commercial terms are nowadays also used to suit the exigencies of a popular general scale so different in principle from that hitherto described, as I will presently explain, that I feel obliged to exhibit a longish table, which will very clearly bring out its Malayan origin.

So far as it deals with matters Malayan, and distinctly in its origin, the international commercial scale, therefore,. constitutes the latest development of the ancient Indian scale of 320 raktikâs to the pala.

Now, while I was endeavouring to trace the history of the Troy weight system of modern India, I had very little to say about the literary scale, and had it not been for the excursions Eastwards we have just been making together, it might have been thought that it had died. So also, in considering the Far Eastern systems, it might be thought that the Indian popular scale of 96 ratis to the tôla had failed to commend itself beyond the Indian borders. But all such institutions die hard, and research will show that the literary scale of India has failed to kill its rival, the popular scale, in more than one most interesting instance.

It is the Indian popular scale that has found its way among the wild tribes on the Indian and Tibeto-Burman border-the Chins, the Lushais, the Nagas, the Singphos, the Kachins-and that, too, despite the eclecticism, with which these untrained populations have borrowed their fiscal terms from their neighbours on both sides the borders. Perhaps one of the most interesting instances existing of the evolution of ideas is to be found in the cumbrous and complicated attempts of the most civilized of these border peoples, the Manipuris, to engraft the ideas embodied in the Indian popular scale on to the terminology of their own previously acquired monetary scale-also by the way originally Indian. That scale had no reference to weight at all, but related to the counting of cowries when used as currency.

This point has more than an academic interest, for it is on the basis of dividing the upper Troy denomination into 400 parts, as a survival of the method of counting cowries for currency, that the Indian popular scale has been carried into Nepal, and from Nepal, through its trade with Tibet, far into all sorts of regions, East and North, in Central Asia. And not only that, it is this very relic of savagery,

this memorial of early attempts to meet the necessities of primitive fiscal conditions, that lived on into the highly civilized gold coinage and currency of the great Emperor Akbar, which was itself based on the Indian popular scale of 96 ratîs to the tôlâ.

But I have kept to the last the best instance of the ground covered by the Indian popular scale in about the least likely place, at first sight, for its occurrence-Ancient China. The case is here based on the badly presented and somewhat, I think, undeservedly discredited researches of my late friend, Terrien de Lacouperie. However, as he has never touched upon the points I am now urging, it is I, and not he, that should be held responsible for what follows.

Terrien de Lacouperie shows, in his cloudy pages, that up to the seventh century A.D. at any rate, and partially up to several centuries later, the old Chinese had a popular scale, which, though it can be compared with the Indian, is, like the Indian, not recognised in the classics. But because this scale contains terms still in use in a very different sense, I wish to mention that I am now speaking of Ancient China only.

Thus :

DIAGRAM IV.

Now, the chu is the conventional adenanthera seed, or, roughly, double the ratî, and therefore the old kin must have represented the tôla. I have elsewhere,* and perhaps erroneously, worked out the old kin to be the Indo-Chinese tickal, which belongs properly to the Indian literary scale. As a matter of practical fact, the kin was actually between the tôla and the tickal; thus, taking common standards, the

* Vide Indian Antiquary, vol. xxvii., p. 29 f.

tôlâ is 180 grains, the kin is 195 grains, and the tickal is 225 grains. However this may be, the great fact remains that the Ancient Chinese, even up to medieval times, had a popular Troy scale closely allied to the Indian and directly comparable with it. It is easy to perceive that, since the Indian popular scale is partly due to Greek influence, this consideration opens up a long vista for speculation and inquiry.

Of course, all the world knows that what I have thus described is not the case now, and that the Chinese have for centuries had a decimal scale. This scale seems to have arisen as a convenient way of enumerating the paper currency established in China between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, A.D. It was, under the Mongols in the thirteenth century, of paramount importance and in universal use, and after centuries of confusing struggle, it suppressed the old and popular scale. I put it forward, as a supposition based on their terminology, that the decimal divisions of the notes were transferred to a new use from the old decimal divisions of the Mongol Army.

I thus speak of this fresh scale, because it is going to give trouble. Chinese trade influence has made itself felt clearly all over the Far East, all over Indo-China and Malay-land. It has become paramount in Tongking, Annam and Cochin-China. It has fought hard in the Philippines and in the Sulu Archipelago with many another influence to good purpose. It has made itself felt in the Malay Archipelago and Peninsula, and has strongly affected Burma and Siam. And the result has been that the comprehension of the existing Far Eastern scales is not quite so easy as it might appear from my former remarks. For I regret to say, that wherever one goes, one has to face the more or less plain existence of two concurrent scales: the local variety of the Indian literary, and the local conception of the Chinese decimal. The less plain the fact, the more puzzling the phenomena always are, and in any case it causes confusion where, indeed, very little is to be desired.

Its troublesome presence exists, however, everywhere. In Siam it pleasantly makes the same term half of itself, according to the scale used in Malay-land it has had the effect of making traders, skippers and travellers, having no doubt clear conceptions of their meaning in their own minds, but not much vernacular knowledge, cheerfully adopt the terms of one scale while using the other: in Burma it has played a kind of practical joke and confused everyone, natives and foreigners. Thus, having carefully learnt that the equivalent of 16 annas makes a kyat or rupee, and that 2 annas make a mû, one naturally expects that half a rupee, i.e., 8 annas, would equal 4 mû. But it does not it equals 5. So also 10 annas equal 6 and not 5 mû. The little difficulty thus created with 12 annas, which should properly equal 6 mû, is got over by calling them 3 màt or quarters, which is correct. Now, all this is not playing the fool on the part of a whole nation. It merely means first, that the Burmese populace has adapted its Troy scale to the British-Indian coinage now current, and next, not being brilliantly endowed with mathematical skill, that it has mixed up the scale borrowed from India with that borrowed from China. In the former 8 mû, and in the latter 10 mû, made a kyat. Thus, in order to face new conditions, the Burmans went straight over from the Indian literary to the Indian popular scale, while adhering to the terminology adopted for the former. In like fashion also, in his gold coinage, the late King, Mindon Min, of Burma, adopted the British - Indian standards, while adhering to the partial decimal system adapted from China. These were both practical measures easily taken, but they caused one investigator, at any rate, a vast deal of inquiry.

The last matter connected with our subject to be seriously affected by Chinese influence was the Far Eastern international commercial scale. This, as I have already said, was in origin Malay, and in the earliest instances in which it comes to light, it is purely Malay in form, too. It is, however, almost as early found current in Chinese form;