Harding. — Certain Decimal aiid Metrical Fallacies. 91 



local prejudices, for the changes as they applied to any given 

 locality would scarcely have been noticed, while thp advan- 

 tages would speedily have made themselves manifest. But no 

 such inquiry was made. The accidental discrepancies were 

 magnified, the underlying principles ignored, just as they are 

 by the metrists of to-day, and a bran-new scheme must be 

 devised — one which, as it was to supersede all others and last 

 for all time, must be nothing less than perfect. 



In that strange period of unrest the judicial faculty seemed 

 to be completely suspended ; the scientific spirit, which 

 breathes only in an atmosphere of humility, was dead. 

 Truth-seekers there were none, for there remained no truth 

 to seek. Carlyle, in his trenchant style, has pictured the 

 utter intellectual barrenness of the time, and the absence of 

 the creative faculty — the scientists who made no discovery, 

 the ingenious men who brought forth no invention. In every 

 department, theoretical or practical — in science, philosophy, 

 politics, or morals — empty symbols took the place of realities, 

 fallacies of facts. Miss Gierke, in a late article in Knoivledge, 

 has eloquently described the self-sufficient "science" of the 

 time : — 



There were no more worlds to conquer. . . . Nature for the 

 moment submitted readily to the trammels put upon her by human 

 thought ; her intricacies no longer seemed to defy unravelment ; her 

 modes of procedure looked straightforward and intelligible. ... It 

 was an epoch of peremptory renewals. Tde formula of equality promised 

 to regenerate society ; a political panacea had been found by the creation 

 of a republic " one and indivisible," and the success of the guillotine in 

 securing its supremacy was almost outdone by the triumphs of the 

 calculus in vindicating the unimpeded sway of gravitation. 



In this spirit — the antithesis of the scientific spirit — the 

 task was undertaken. The result was a comedy of blunders 

 to which the history of science can scarcely furnish a parallel. 



The unit of measurement was necessarilv the foundation 

 of the entire system. The reformers had to their hand the 

 ancient foot of France with its authoritative standards ; they 

 had access to the corresponding measures of Eui-ope, from 

 which, had they chosen, they might have deduced an average. 

 But their unit must be new. Destined to be universal, it 

 must be earth-commensurable. It must at the same time be 

 unmistakably and indisputably French. So at great expense 

 and with enormous labour they measured an arc of the meri- 

 dian passing through France, divided the quadrant of the 

 meridian thus deduced into ten million parts — that is, a forty- 

 millionth of the entire circle — and this unit is the metre. 



Note, first, the initial blunder — denounced by Herschel as 

 " a scientific sin "—the choice of a curve as the basis of recti- 

 linear measurement. The fact that the curve was on so large 

 a scale that its true form was inappreciable to the senses does 



