18 Dr Whe well's Inaugural Lecture. 



how much this would facilitate and promote their working 

 together ; how fatal to co-operation is diversity and ambi- 

 guity in the language used. One of our old verse writers, 

 expanding according to the suggestions of his fancy, the ac- 

 count of the failure of men in the case of the tower of Babel, 

 has made this cause of failure very prominent. He supposes 

 that, the language of the workmen being confounded, when 

 one of them asked for a spade, his companion brought him a 

 bucket ; or when he called for mortar, handed him a plumb- 

 line ; and that, by the constant recurrence of these incon- 

 gruous proceedings, the work necessarily came to a stand. 

 Now the conditions necessary, in order that workmen may 

 work together, really go much farther than the use of a com- 

 mon language, in the general sense of the phrase. It is not 

 only necessary that- they should call a brick a brick, and a 

 wire a wire, and a nail a nail, and a tube a tube, and a w^heel 

 a wheel ; but it is desirable, also, that wires, and nails, and 

 tubes, and wheels, should each be classified and named, so 

 that all bricks should be of one size, so that a wire number 

 3, or a tube section 1, or a six-inch wheel, should have a fixed 

 and definite signification ; and that wires, and tubes, and 

 wheels, should be constructed so as to correspond to such 

 significations ; and even, except for special purposes, no others 

 than such. It may easily be conceived, for instance, how 

 immensely the construction, adjustment, and repair of wheel - 

 work would be facilitated, if wheels of a certain kind were all 

 made with teeth of the same kind, so that any one could work 

 in any other. And something of this sort, — something which 

 secures some of these and the like advantages, has been done 

 with reference to cast-iron toothed wheels. And an eminent 

 engineer, whose works stood in the Sixth Class of the collec- 

 tion to which I have just referred, has proposed a system by 

 which a like uniformity should be secured in the dimensions 

 and fitting of machinery ; and especially with regard to 

 screws ; fixing thus their exact diameter and pitch, as it is 

 called — a process which would have the like efi^ect of making 

 the construction, application, and repair of all work into 

 which screws enter vastly more easy and expeditious than it 

 now is. Now these are the great and beneficial effects which 



