92 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



not affect the question. To tx'eat it as a right Hne was inex- 

 cusable on the part of men professing to institute a scientific 

 reform in a scientific way. They based their whole fabric on 

 a fundamental fallacy, consciously and deliberately, without 

 even the excuse of ignorance. Note, too, that an arc of 

 the meridian — unless it be one like that of Greenwich Ob- 

 servatory, selected by common consent as a starting-point 

 — has no significance, and even in such an exceptional case 

 its significance is only arbitrary and factitious. The meri- 

 dians of a sphere are infinite in number, and unless the 

 sphere is geometrically perfect are not uniform. The de- 

 grees of the terrestrial meridians vary in length from 66'91 to 

 69-40 miles. Note, too, that the standard, it lost, could never 

 be restored by a repetition of the original process. Variations 

 in the result inevitably appear on remeasurement, however 

 exact, and this particular measurement was exceptionally 

 difficult. As it was, the result was soon found to be appre- 

 ciably wrong. The error is now stated to be 4,008 ft. So 

 that the new universal earth- commensurable and French unit 

 proved, after all the trouble and expense lavished upon it, to 

 be arbitrary — to possess no more intrinsic significance than 

 the length of a i-andom straw picked up in the harvest-field. 

 It may be said — it has been said, since the insignificance of 

 the standard cannot be disputed — " No matter, so long as the 

 standard is there and is recognised.""^' But it is evident that 

 a really scientific standard must have significance. The re- 

 formers must have realised this, else why all this costly and 

 elaborate preliminary parade of earth - measurement? Why 

 inconvenience a whole nation for a hundred years when the 

 ancient toise, divided and multiplied by ten, would have 



* An old article in the Atheno'um, referring to the erroneous measure- 

 ments on which the standard was hased, said, " An error of ^Jg inch in 

 the determination of the vidtre is more than counterbalanced by the 

 extreme simplicity, symnietry, and convenience of the metric system. 

 Professor Bessel observed in rcs])ect to the vu'tre that, in the measure- 

 ment of a length between two points on the surface of the earth, there is 

 no advantage at all in proving the relation of the measured distance to a 

 quadrant of the meridian. Professor Miller, of Cambridge, who quotes 

 this remark, deems the error in the relation of the vuHre to the quadrant 

 of the meridian to be of no consequence ; and he mentions another slight 

 error in the metric system, discovered by recent research, and relating to 

 the density of water, which he gives in the following words of Bessel : 

 'The kilogramme is not exactly the weight of a cubic di'cimiHrc of water. 

 Many of the late weighings show that water at its maximum dpnsity has 

 different density from that a.ssumed by the French philos iphers who pre- 

 pared the original standard of the kilogramme ; but nobody wishes to 

 alter the standard of the gramme on that account.' " So that while the 

 defects, real or imagitied, of the British system are proclaimed and paraded 

 by metrists, the acknowledged errors in the French scheme, fundamental 

 or co-ordinate, arc " of no consequence." 



