104 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



us. " History," as a writer of a past generation has well 

 said, "shows that, while Governments change with great 

 facility their money systems, their constitution, and even 

 their religion, weights and measures seem immovable. They 

 are, indeed, so mixed and, as it were, matted with every 

 concern of property that they cannot be essentially altered 

 without violence and confusion. Nor are these evils of a 

 temporary nature. The habits, customs, and prejudices of 

 the multitude are not to be speedily changed." The experi- 

 ence of every country where such a change has been decreed 

 sufficiently confirms the statement. But it is not in the 

 interests of "the multitude" that the change is made, nor 

 are their " habits, customs, and prejudices," if such happen to 

 conflict with the prevailing fashion in science (so called), 

 deemed worthy of consideration. Happily, fashions in science, 

 as in costume, have a way of becoming unfashionable, while 

 despised "habits, customs, and prejudices" — often the in- 

 tuitive wisdom of the many, or embodying the concrete 

 results of the experience of a distant past — have a perennial 

 vitality extremely irritating to the exponents of the latest 

 theories. 



After all, our national measures, which — in these days of 

 rampant "Imperialism," too! — it has become the unpatriotic 

 fashion to contemn, are fundamentally more scientific, as well 

 as more generally convenient, than their foreign rivals. They 

 are no mere "accidental " inheritance, nor do they show any 

 signs of haphazard origin. Whence the Saxons derived them, 

 and how, is not known ; but they can be shown to possess a 

 venerable antiquity, and to have passed down the ages prac- 

 tically unchanged. A jealous regard for accurate standards 

 is an ancient characteristic of our race. Were there such a 

 thing in nature as an imnmtable standard, convenient and 

 everywhere accessible, no doubt it would have been accepted, 

 but no such natural unit has ever been found. The wise men 

 of old everywhere selected the nearest approach which has yet 

 been found to such a unit. They did not take a random 

 terrestrial measurement with neither scientific nor practical 

 value. They recognised that measures were subordinate to 

 man and not man to measures, and from first to last, there- 

 fore, their standard was "the measure of a man." Proof of 

 this fact is built into the very structure of language. There is 

 not an ancient term of measurement in our tongue, save those 

 denoting infinitesimals, that cannot be referred to the human 

 frame.* 



* The fathom is the height of a well-developed man, and also the 

 stretch of his p^rins, which, in fact, tlie woni itself signifies. Philologists 

 refer it to the root " fat," to extend. The Saxon word " fivSm " signifies 

 " the space reached by the extended arms — reach, embrace." In Danish, 



