A " stone" weight in England is fourteen pounds.

Counterfeiting was formerly treason under British law.

Abraham was "very rich in cattle, in silver and in gold."

Ninety coins per minute is fair working speed at the mint.

The double eagle, 516 grains, is the heaviest American coin.

A stiver was an ancient Dutch coin of about two cents value.

The so-called " coppers" of British money are now all bronze.

Five courses of brick will lay one foot in height on a chimney.

The standard gallon contains just ten pounds' Weight of pure water.

The carat, which is used to weigh diamonds, is equal to 3.17 Troy grains.

Silver is only a legal tender in England to the amount of forty shillings.

The Saxons used an ell, or yard of thirty-six inches, based on the Roman foot.

The Lydians, according to Herodotus, were the first nation to use gold and silver coin.

The coins of the Cromwellian period had the inscription in English instead of Latin.

The moidore is a Portuguese gold coin, now almost extinct, worth about seven dollars.

The first gold coin struck at Rome, 207 B.C., was the aureus, of the value of about six dollars.

Modern Japanese coinage includes oblong pieces of gold and silver, as well as large oval plates.

A cord of stone, three bushels of lime and a cubic yard of sand will lay 100 cubic feet of wall.

The palm, or hand-breadth, was the original standard of measure, then the foot and cubit successively.

The so-called "Latin" Union was an agreement between France, Italy, Belgium and Switzerland (1865-80) to maintain a uniform coinage.

One thousand shingles, laid four inches to the weather, will cover 100 square feet of surface, and five pounds of shingle nails will fasten them on.

One-fifth more siding and flooring is needed than the number of square feet of surface to be covered, because of the lap in the siding and matching.

A denarius was a Roman silver coin, value about sixteen cents. It was used in France and England for ready money generally. It was also a weight (three scruples).

A cubic foot of cork weighs 1.5 lbs.; of bees, 65 lbs.; of blood, 66 lbs.; of coal, 56 lbs.; of earth, 94 lbs.; of hay, 9 lbs.; of ice, 571/2 lbs.; of copper, 547 lbs.; of cast iron, 450 lbs.; of gold, 1,2031/2 lbs.; of platina, 1,219 lbs.

To find the quantity of shelled corn in a crib of corn in the ear, measure the length, breadth and height of the crib, inside of the crib, multiply them together and divide them by two and you have the number of bushels in the crib.

One thousand laths will cover seventy yards of surface, and eleven pounds of lath nails will nail them on. Eight bushels of good lime, sixteen bushels of sand and one bushel of hair will make enough good mortar to plaster 100 square yards.

Very large amounts of private gold coins were formerly minted in this country by individuals. Reid of Georgia, the Bechtlers of North Carolina, the Mormons in Utah, and several banking firms in California, all once did a large business in this line.

A rupee is a silver coin, the standard or unit of the money system of India; value at par, fifty cents; 100,000 rupees = a lac; 100 lacs = a crore. Owing to the falling-off in the value of silver, a rupee is at present not worth more than thirty cents in gold.

The picayune is a name derived from the Carib language, and used in Louisiana for a small coin worth six and one-fourth cents, current in the United States before 1857, and known in different states by various names (fourpence, fippence, fip, sixpence, etc.).

The name of Bezants, or Byzantines, is given to the coins, either gold or silver, of the Byzantine empire. They varied in value from five dollars to two and a half dollars. As bezants were brought to England by the crusaders, they frequently occur as English heraldic charges.

Goldsmiths and assayers divide the troy pound, ounce, or any other weight into twenty-four parts, and call each a carat, as a means of stating the proportion of pure gold contained in any alloy of gold with other metals. Thus the gold of our coinage and of wedding rings, which contains 22/24 of pure gold, is called "22-carats fine," or 22-carat gold.

A guinea was an English gold coin, so called from having been originally coined of gold brought from the Guinea cost in 1663. Its value has varied at different periods. At first it equalled twenty shillings, it was in 1685 worth thirty shillings, and in 1717 twenty-one shillings, beyond which price it was by an Act of Parliament in 1811 forbidden to be sold, or exported. The issue of the sovereign (1817) virtually abolished the coinage of the guinea.

A cubit was a Roman measure of length, supposed to equal the length of the fore-arm from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. It was 11/2 Roman feet (171/2 English inches). The English cubit is 11/2 English feet. The cubit of Scripture is generally estimated at twenty-two inches.

It is a big job to count a trillion. Had Adam counted continuously from his creation to the present day, he would not have reached that number, for it would take him over 9,512 years. At the rate of 200 a minute, there could be counted 12,000 an hour, 288,000 a day, and 105,-120,000 a year.

The scudo (Ital., "shield"), is an Italian silver coin corresponding to the Spanish piastre, the American dollar and the English crown. It was so called from its bearing the heraldic shield of the prince by whose authority it was struck, and differed slightly in value in the different states of Italy, the usual value being about one dollar.

The tael is a money of account in China, and is equivalent to a tael weight of pure silver, or to about twelve hundred and fifty of the copper coin known as "cash." The value of the Haikwan tael or customs tael is 4s. 9d., about $1.14, varying with the price of silver. In 1890 it was superseded by the new dollar, equal in value to our dollar.

Gunter's chain is a chain used for land measuring. It is twenty-two yards long, the square of which is 484. Now an acre is 4,840 square yards, and therefore a square chain is a tenth of an acre, or 10=1 acre. Again a chain contains 10,000 square links, and as 10 chains = an acre, it follows that 100,000 square links = an acre. So that, in measuring a field by a Gunter's chain, all that is required is to divide the result by 100,000, or (which is the same thing) to cut off the last five figures, to obtain the area in acres.

The real is a silver coin and money of account in Spain, Mexico and other old Spanish possessions, and is the 1/20th part of the piastre, or 1/4th. of the peseta, the franc of the new Spanish decimal system, and has a value, varying with the exchange, of about five cents. The real was first coined in Spain in 1497. It is also a money of account in Portugal, being the equivalent of forty reis. In Java it is the name of a weight for gold and silver articles, corresponding to seventeen penny weights and fourteen grains troy weight.

The "foot" is named from the length of that member in a full-grown man. Some say that it was so called from the length of the foot of a certain English king, but it is believed to have been a standard of measurement among the ancient Egyptians. The cubit is from the Latin cubitus, an elbow, and is the distance from the elbow to the end of the middle finger. Fathom is from the Aryan fat, to extend, and denotes the distance from tip to tip of the fingers when the arms of an average-sized man are fully extended.

The decimal system is that by which weights and measures are calculated by tens and multiples of ten. The basis of this system is the metre = 39.37 in.; of liquid capacity the litre, one-tenth of the metre; of solid measure the stere, the cube of the metre; of weight the gramme = one cubic centimetre of distilled water at 39.2° Fahr. The decimal system for money is used in France, where the franc (twenty cents) is the unit of value. The system also obtains in the United States, Italy, Spain, and other countries in Europe and elsewhere.

Counterfeiting is the making of false money. In the United States the crime of counterfeiting coin or money is punishable with fine and imprisonment at hard labor for a term of from two to ten years; and includes falsely making, forging or counterfeiting coins or notes, postal money orders, postal cards, government stamps of all kinds, and government securities, as also importing, possessing, uttering, or passing false coins or notes with fraudulent intent. Mutilating and debasing the coin is also counterfeiting, but is not so severely punished.

The talent was the heaviest unit of weight among the Greeks. The word is used by Homer to signify indifferently a balance and a definite weight of some monetary currency. Silver coin was first struck in Hellas proper in the island of Aegina, and the Aeginetan standard was apparently adapted to the Babylonian gold standard. The Babylonian commercial talent seems to have been either 65 pound, 5 ounces, or 66 pound, 5l/2 ounces, and its value in silver from $1,700 to $2,000. Derivatives of this (containing 3,000 shekels) were in use in Phoenicia and Palestine; but there was another silver talent, and a gold talent worth |ths of the commercial talent. The Euboic talent was of smaller monetary measure and weight than the Aeginetan.