156 Captain Sabine on the 



by which it should be made; and, that there is no country so 

 competent to the undertaking as Great Britain ; nor any time so 

 suitable as the present; Avhen the experience which she has 

 gained in her northern voyages, (which have long since ceased to 

 have any more important practical object in view than the acqui- 

 sition of such experience, and the cultivation generally of a spirit 

 of enterprise,) may be most advantageously applied in the attain- 

 ment of a purpose, of the highest rank in the advancement of 

 science, and in the general interest of which, the nations of every 

 quarter of the globe, and of all succeeding periods will partici- 

 pate. It is time that Great Britain, pre-eminent as she is in com- 

 mercial enterprise, and in that of maritime and geographical 

 discovery, with wealth at command, and a government well- 

 disposed to " forward every undertaking worthy of a great nation, 

 and by which it may occupy an additional page in history," should 

 assert a like pre-eminence, (which she does not at present pos- 

 sess,) in enterprises of a higher character, than the mere tracing 

 the direction of a river, or the completion of the outline of dis- 

 tant, and for any useful purpose, unprofitable shores. 



We proceed to notice, and we shall do so as briefly as possible, 

 the bearing of Captain Sabine's experiments upon the application 

 of the pendulum as a standard of measure, and upon the experi- 

 ments which are previously considered to have referred the 

 British linear scale to a definite length in nature. It is in this 

 relation that we consider his work as entitled to the greatest at- 

 tention, because the pendulum furnishes in all probability the 

 only natural standard of measure that is invariable, determinate, 

 and easily determinable, and as such it has become the subject of 

 legislative enactments, having been adopted in an act passed in 

 the session of 1824, and referred to as the means of identifying 

 the authentic legal scale of Great Britain : there can be no doubt 

 however, after the perusal of Captain Sabine's remarks, in pages 

 364 to 372, that the provision made by the act is inadequate for 

 the purpose ; and there cannot be a stronger evidence of the im- 

 portance of more consideration being devoted to the subject, than 

 that the provision of an act, designed expressly for the most dis- 

 tant posterity, should thus be shewn to be incompetent to its pur- 

 pose, even before the act itself has arrived in operation. The 

 act declares the British imperial yard to bear a certain proportion 

 to the " pendulum vibrating seconds of mean time in the lati- 

 tude of London, in a vacuum at the level of the sea." It neces- 

 sarily assumes, consequently, 1st. That the length in nature so 

 referred to, is of an uniform magnitude, and 2d, Not only that it 

 has been measured, but that all future measurements must con- 

 duct to an identical result. 



With respect to the first point, the experiments that are con- 

 tained in the present volume shew conclusively that the latitude. 



