110 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



Engineers sent out a ballot-paper with a series of questions 

 on the subject. There were 514 responses, and the adverse 

 votes were three to one. 



Our textile goods would be affected. The housewife would 

 no longer buy fabrics by the yard, nor could she do her 

 marketing by the pound. 



All familiar landmarks, such as milestones and railway 

 distance-pegs, w^ould be obsolete. No doubt the State, to set 

 an example, would at once set about pulling them up and 

 grading in kilometers. " A frightful waste," says a cor- 

 respondent of the Engineering World (London), "and for 

 what use? " 



To the astronomer it closes the ledger which, as Proctor 

 told us, has been kept posted for three thousand years. The 

 navigator's tables and books of reference will be obsolete, and 

 the shipowner will have to forget his tonnages. The occupier 

 of land — owner or tenant — must recalculate boundaries and 

 recompute superficial areas. The Land and Survey Depart- 

 ment would have the same costly task, and on a truly mag- 

 nificent scale. Two-thirds of the world's trade would be 

 disorganized while the change — necessarily slow — was in pro- 

 gress. 



It would play ciuel havoc with our national inheritance of 

 literature. The nomenclature is barbarous and unconform- 

 able to the genius of our tongue, while our classics, if the pre- 

 sent standards ever became obsolete, would require continual 

 annotation. Let us open an edition of Shakespeare, say, of 



A.D. 2003:— 



A merry heart goes all the day, 

 Your sad tires in a mile-a.* 



This bond is forfeit, 

 And lawfully by this the Jew may claim 

 A pound [= 0-454 kilo.] of flesh. 



Full 9'144 meters thy father lies ; 

 Of his bones are coral made. 



How the substituted nomenclature could be worked into 

 English verse (other than burlesque) is a question that poets 

 would have to settle. 



On patriotic and commercial grounds alike we should resist 

 the change. The widest charity does not require us to com- 

 mit commercial suicide that France and Germany may enjoy 

 increased prosperity. 



I have already referred to the impossibility of restoring the 

 metric standard by repeating the original measurements ; also 

 to the fact that after the lapse of a century the old standards 

 are not extinct in Erance. Will it be credited tliat a German 

 advocate of the meter urges the necessity for careful preserva- 



• Mile. — An ancient lineal measure 1-G09 kilometers. 



