A Note on the Roman Numerals. 
171 
1907-8.] 
Incidentally, too, it may be interesting to note that this method of inter- 
pretation, or rather this origin of alphabetic characters, was known to 
the Romans ; thus Tacitus (Ann., xi. 14) writes : “ Primi per figuras ani- 
malium Aegyptii sensus mentis effingebant — ea antiquissima monimenta 
memoriae humanae inpressa saxis cernuntur — et litterarum semet inven- 
tores perhibent.” 
An examination of such systems, however, shows that not only animals 
and natural objects were represented in the primitive signs, but that the 
human body and its parts — the eyes, the arms and hands, the legs and feet 
— were rudely sketched and made to represent or express some act, motion, 
or feeling of primitive man. 
Nor was it for alphabetic characters alone that the human body was 
thus used as model.* For measurements of all kinds it formed a convenient 
standard, sufficiently exact for practical purposes, capable of being applied 
to everything and employed by everyone. Did one wish to measure the 
size of an object ? He had only to compare that object with a part, or 
parts, of his body. Did one wish to estimate distance ? He had but to 
measure that distance with his own pair of compasses — recording the 
result in the number of strides taken. Thus the Romans called “hand- 
breadths,” palmi (palms : “ hands,” as one says in horse-measurement) ; 
“ finger-breadths,” digiti ; “ length from elbow to tip of middle finger 
cubitus (cubit) ; “ length from shoulder to wrist or finger,” ulna (ell) ; 
“foot-length,” pes (“foot”); “thumb-joint length,” uncia (inch); and a 
“ thousand paces,” mille passuum (mile). To these might be added other 
examples, as, the ancient measure of weight, “ dram,” or “ drachma ” (Greek 
SpaxM> “what the hand can grasp”), a “handful”; “palm,” for which 
the Egyptian symbol was the open hand ; “ fathom,” the measure of length 
(A.-S. foethm, “ embrace ”), like the Greek opyvia, the “ length of the out- 
stretched arms.” Vitruvius, the learned and leisured architect to Augustus 
Caesar, or the later writer who adopted that architect’s name in the fourth 
century A.D., refers to this practice of body-measurement ( De Architectura, 
III, i.) : “. . . mensurarum rationes, quae in omnibus operibus videntur 
necessariae esse, ex corporis membris collegerunt, uti digitum palmum pedem 
cubitum.” For “man,” in a very literal sense, “was the measure of all 
things.” 
* A curious use of the body is described by N. W. Thomas in his Natives of Australia 
(London, 1906), p. 27 : “ . . . They touch various parts of the body in succession, the wrist, 
the arm, the head, etc., each standing for a particular day, until the intended date is reached. 
The two or more parties to the arrangement can then keep count of the flight of time by 
this ingenious system of mnemonics, and meet on the appointed day with as much certainty 
as if they noted their engagement in a diary.” 
