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349 54 Review of Ridgeway’s The Origin of Metallic Currency 23 June 1892 Houghton Library The Origin of Metallic Currency and Weight Standards. By William Ridgeway, Professor of Greek in Queen’s College, Cork. Cambridge (Eng.) University Press: NewYork: Macmillan. 1892. Compound arithmetic can certainly make itself very disagreeable. From the urchin writhing in the agonies of a long sum in long measure, up to Belshazzar, watching the hand write upon the wall those distressful words, “Pounds, pounds, ounces, drams,” that suggested there was an account to settle with God, mortals have doubtless undergone more misery, first and last, from this branch of mathematics than from any other. On the other hand, to accompany a learned and ingenious essayist in his explorations of ancient metrology, to cut the rope that ties us to the here and now, to mount the heights of speculation, borne up by a beautiful and globular theory, to cleave the thin air of ancient texts, and trust to our guide to get us back to terra firma, this is a most delightful and entertaining pastime. Alas! we have blown our last parting kiss to the theorists of our boyhood, Boeckh, Queipo, Hultsch, and the rest. They have sailed away for ever, and we shall never see their like upon earth again, with those two beautiful propositions of theirs, first, that, in the ancient systems generally, the units of weight, length, and capacity were connected in much the same scientific way as the gramme, the metre, and the litre are connected; and, second, that in the ancient world pretty much all the weights and measures of all climes and ages were in simple commensurable relations to one another. We know that, before the adoption of the metric system, different towns of Europe used at least 400 different pounds, and probably twice as many. The units of capacity and of length were quite as numerous; and there was no rational connection between them. In short, the language of quantity was as various as the dialects of speech. But the accepted doctrine until lately was that the Babylonian (or, as some said, the Egyptian) system was Writings of C. S. Peirce 1890–1892 350 strictly scientific; and that all the peoples of antiquity followed that, or, at least, used only standards commensurable with those of that system, or, at most, slightly modified from it. These propositions rested upon the testimony of ancient authors, supplemented by divers ingenious arithmetical computations by which certain relations between certain quantities were made to appear. If anybody objected, as many a man of logical sense did, that such calculations proved nothing but the idle industry of their inventors, and that the documents were almost all of extremely late date, and probably expressed merely convenient approximations , like “A pint’s a pound the whole world round,” the answer was that we were not at liberty to reject the only evidence in our possession . Yet some enduring work was accomplished by the old metrologists ; namely, they weighed and measured, besides coins, perhaps a hundred ancient standards and a smaller number of other monuments. Within a few years Mr. W. M. Flinders Petrie has determined the values of many hundred additional ancient standards and has measured thousands of monuments. What is far more important, he has contrived methods by which scientific logic can be brought to bear with all its force upon questions of ancient metrology. His conclusions will be found summarized in the article “Weights and Measures” in the Encyclop ædia Britannica, last edition. Having determined no less than 516 weight-standards unearthed by him in the Greek-Egyptian town of Naucratis, he has embodied the results in a curve whose abscissas measure the quantities of the weights, while its ordinates are proportional to the numbers of specimens of the different quantitative values. This curve shows certain maxima; and upon these maxima it is precisely that Petrie bases his reasoning. We know from many careful experimental researches that when men try to reproduce many times any quantity, the values they do produce will cluster about the truth, or about the truth affected by a constant error. The curve of these values will show a maximum at that point. Now, the Naucratis makers of weights were undoubtedly trying to reproduce some standards, legal or illegal. Consequently , each well-marked maximum of the curve represents the value of a standard they were trying to reproduce. This logic is irrefragable . Prof. Ridgeway endeavors to...

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