206 THE EVOLUTION OF 



of bullion have become tested for weight. So greatly 

 has the necessity for the weighment of bullion impressed 

 itself on mankind that the highly civilized Eastern mind 

 is still largely incapable of separating the ideas involved 

 in the terms used for money and for its weight, and in 

 many parts of Europe, though we count our money, we 

 still speak of it in terms of weight when naming our 

 money of account : e.g. the English pound. Like 

 everything connected with money, this very counting of 

 pieces of it has a development of its own, which can only 

 be alluded to in passing, though it is well worth exhaus- 

 tive study. The whole history of tallies and tallying 

 is of interest, especially where, as in the case of the 

 Nicobarese, it is possible to trace in one people the 

 entire evolution from the rude tallying of their currency 

 in pairs of coco-nuts to the use of practical, but entirely 

 unconscious, commercial scales based on enumeration 

 by the score, which by the way is itself the decimal scale 

 applied to pairs. Then again there is the method of 

 counting cowries by separating them out of a heap in 

 fours and fives, leading to the well-known and important 

 Eastern scales of quintets and quartets and of four fours 

 or sixteens. The adaptation of quartets to an alien 

 currency, superseding their own, has led to perhaps the 

 most complicated monetary nomenclature in existence in 

 the State of Manipur on the Assam border, just as the 

 clash and semi-amalgamation of the great Indian scale 

 of sixteen and of the Chinese decimal scale (which in 

 passing it may be noted is not indigenous) has led in 

 Burma to that apparently but not really hopeless divi- 

 sion of the unit of money that has induced the people 

 to speak of six where they should say five and of five 

 as the half of eight. We have also had in Europe our 

 cambists, which deal with almost every conceivable scale 



