COMMITTEES ON BEHALF OF THE GOVERNMENT 211 
They were brought up in the Senate on July 27, 1866, by 
Senator Sumner, who made a speech on their merits, and were 
passed on that day without discussion. The last two above 
mentioned were approved on the same day, July 27, 1866, and 
the first on July 28, 1866. 
Thus, it appears that in this instance the recommendations of 
the Academy were received and accepted by Congress, and that 
the action taken was in accord therewith. It is clearly a case 
in which the Academy helped the Government. 
At the same time at which the use of metric measures was 
legalized, Congress enacted a law enabling the Secretary of the 
Treasury to supply a set of the standards to each of the States 
of the Union. The Secretary requested the National Academy 
to advise him as to the kind and form of standards that should 
be furnished, the material of which they should be made, and the 
proper means of verifying them. The request was referred to 
the Committee on Weights and Measures which reported to the 
Academy at the meeting of August, 1867. The report was 
transmitted to the Treasury Department and the recommenda- 
tions which it contained were adopted.” 
Congress passed a third act at the same time with the other two, 
as we have seen, authorizing the use in post-offices of weights of 
the denomination of grams. The Academy appears not to have 
been directly concerned in the passage of this measure, but at 
the annual meeting of the following year (1867) a resolution was 
adopted to the effect that the Academy considered it “ highly 
desirable that the discretionary power granted by Congress to 
the Postmaster-General to use the metrical weights in the post 
offices (should) be exercised at the earliest convenient day.” As 
we have noted in a previous chapter, a committee was appointed 
in 1868 to urge upon the Postmaster-General the importance of 
adopting the action mentioned in this resolution, but no results 
followed at that time. 
The interest of the National Academy in metric measures 
did not end with these proceedings. It will be recalled that two 
Rep. Nat. Acad. Sci. for 1879, p. 13. 
