He adds that copper is sold by weight (picul), and that tin, which was accidentally discovered in 1710 by the burning of a house, is exported for the most part in small pieces or cakes called tampangs, sometimes in slabs (p. 172), and furthermore they purchase bar iron by measurement instead of by weight (p. 176).
Several points of great importance are to be noticed in the foregoing statements. Firstly, that whilst for foreign trade with the Chinese they employ the Chinese weight, which we know always by its Malay name of picul, a well-defined weight standard of 133⅓ lbs. avoirdupois, they had evidently a native unit of weight, their own picul, which simply means and actually was as much as a man can carry on his back, and which, as we saw, rarely exceeds 80 lbs. avoirdupois. This seems to give us an insight into the manner in which the most primitive highest weight unit is arrived at. A man’s load is one of those natural standards which will vary according to race and climate, and the conditions under which the load has to be borne. Thus, the average weight of the load borne by a dock porter who has to endure the strain for only some few yards, will of course be far higher than that carried by the porters of travellers in Central Africa, where the load has to be borne day after day on a march of several hundred, or a thousand miles. Thus in the case of the Madis, a pure negro tribe, the average load seems to be about 50 pounds, which they can carry “20 miles a day for eight or ten consecutive days without shewing any signs of distress[228].” The Chinese, the superiors in science of all Eastern Asia, have carefully adjusted this “load,” and it makes, as we have seen above, their highest weight unit. Its particular amount is probably due to the fact that, having carefully fixed the weight of the smaller units, the candarin, the mace, the liung or tael, and the catty, their pound, they simply took the hundredfold of the chang or catty as the standard for their highest unit, and thus that which at an earlier stage was just as vague and fluctuating as the picul, or back-loads in use still among the less-advanced peoples of the Indian Archipelago, became a fixed scientific unit. Secondly, we must notice that the Malays have not followed the Chinese in the subdivisions of the catty. For whilst in China 16 taels or ounces go to the catty, the Malays follow more strictly the decimal system, and make their catty simply the tenfold of the tael or ounce. This same method of division we found already in Annam, and not only in Annam but also in Cambodia and Laos we found the silver nên or bar, invariably consisting of ten such parts, corresponding in weight to the Chinese tael, sixteen of which go to the catty.
It would appear, then, that here we have a combination of units of weight and units of capacity. The higher gold and silver unit, the nên, is simply the tenfold of the lower unit, the tael or ounce, while the catty, which is never employed in China in estimating gold or silver, but is a genuine commercial unit, was probably originally some natural unit of capacity. We saw strong evidence of this in Cambodia, where the name for this weight is neal or cocoanut, and we have just found the cocoanut as the chief unit of dry measure amongst the Malays of the Indian Seas. It was probably found that 16 times the tael or ounce came nearer to the weight of the contents of a cocoanut or bamboo joint (whatever kind of matter they may have weighed in it for this purpose, whether rice, or water), than the original 10 ounces, which formed the bar, the highest genuine weight unit. Sixteen was likewise a convenient number, its factors being numerous, and it could be divided in four portions, each of which contained four other units. It will presently be a question as to whether similar influences have not produced our pound avoirdupois, with its 16 sub-multiples.
M. Moura found a difficulty regarding the Cambodian neal or cocoanut catty; because a neal of rice only weighs half the weight, at which the neal is rated as a weight. But we saw in Java that the chapa or cocoanut measure is estimated at 2½ pounds avoirdupois. It is then not improbable that some liquid or substance far heavier than rice was used to fill the cocoanut, when the value of its contents was being ascertained by weighing so as to serve as a general unit. The same variation in weight, owing to the different nature of its contents, has, as mentioned before, given rise in Ireland to barrels of various weights. Thus a barrel of wheat contains 20 stone avoirdupois, a barrel of potatoes 24 stone, a barrel of barley 16 stone, and a barrel of oats 14 stone. This diversity simply arose from comparative lightness or heaviness of the different commodities which were measured by one and the same unit of capacity: the barrel itself, having been fixed by a process of measurement, similar to that by which the milk-pan was regulated among the Welsh, and the pannier among the natives of Laos. The principle by which higher units of capacity or weight are formed is likewise well illustrated by the instance given above of the cartload of rice, which is simply regarded as the multiple of the pannier or bag, which forms the smaller unit for rice. The size of the cartload would be conditioned by the size of the cart usually employed, which in turn would depend on a variety of other things, such as the nature of the country, or its roads, or the kind of animals employed for draught. The vagueness in amount of the koyan or multiple of the picul noticed by Crawfurd, may thus meet with a reasonable explanation.
We may now return to the mainland of Asia, where we shall find in the weight system of the Hindus at least one remarkable point of affinity with that of Sumatra. Marsden has told us that the rakat or scarlet pea with a black spot is one of the chief weights employed for gold in Sumatra. This rakat is none other than the ratti, which is usually taken as the basis of the modern Hindu weight system. “This weight,” says that eminent scholar Colebrooke[229], “is the lowest denomination in general use, commonly known by the name ratti, the same with rattika, which, as well as ṛaktika, denotes the red seed as kṛishnala indicates the black seed of the gunjá-creeper.” Mr Thomas has shown the true weight of the ratti is 1·75 grains[230].
Many different standards have been used in India for various purposes, one for the weighing of gold, another for the weighing of silver, another used by jewellers, and yet another by the medical tribe, but all alike start from the ratti.
“The determination of the true weight of the ratti has done much both to facilitate and give authority to the comparison of the ultimately divergent standards of the ethnic kingdoms of India. Having discovered the guiding unit, all other calculations become simple, and present singularly convincing results, notwithstanding that the bases of all these estimates rest upon so erratic a test as the growth of the seed of the gunjá-creeper (Abrius precatorius) under the varied influences of soil and climate. Nevertheless the small compact grain, checked in early times by other products of nature, is seen to have the remarkable faculty of securing a uniform average throughout the entire continent of India, which only came to be disturbed when monarchs like Shîr Shâh and Akbar in their vanity raised the weight of the coinage without any reference to the numbers of rattis, inherited from Hindu sources, and officially recognized in the old, but entirely disregarded and left undefined in the reformed Muhammadan mintages[231].” We shall learn shortly that in its uniformity the ratti does not differ from other seeds such as wheat and barley. Probably, however, the fact that the gunjá-creeper was found everywhere in India gave it its position of a universal standard. Those who wish to study the elaborate systems of later times employed in India can consult the works of Colebrooke and Thomas already referred to.
The legislators Manu, Yájnavalkya, and Nárada trace all weights from the least visible quantity which they concur in naming trasareṇu and describing as the very small mote, “which may be discovered in a sunbeam passing through a lattice.” Writers on medicine proceed a step further, and affirm that a trasareṇu contains 30 paramáṇu or atoms. The legislators above-named proceed from the trasareṇu as follows:
| 8 trasareṇus | = | 1 likshá, or minute poppy-seed. |
| 3 likshás | = | 1 raja-sarshapa, or black mustard-seed. |
| 3 raja-sarshapas | = | 1 gaura-sarshapa, or white mustard-seed. |
| 6 gaura-sarshapas | = | 1 yava, or middle-sized barley-corn. |
| 3 yavas | = | 1 kṛishnala, or seed of the gunjá. |
But as we want to learn what was the actual usage of the Hindus, instead of dealing with the mere theoretic statements of late authors, I shall at once quote in full the tables given in the Līlāvati of Brahmegupta, who wrote his Algebra and Arithmetic about 600 A.D.[232]