12 THE LIFE OF SCIENCE 



the metric system! How can they do it? I really don't know, but 

 they do it with a fervor only equalled by the paradoxical ab- 

 surdity of their plea. A Frenchman needs no fraction but the deci- 

 mal,* and these can take care of themselves, so to say; he hardly 

 notices them. On the contrary your Englishman uses vigesimal 

 fractions if he speaks of pounds sterling and shillings; both Amer- 

 icans and Englishmen need duodecimal fractions when dealing 

 with feet and inches, and sixteenths to measure in pounds avoir- 

 dupois and ounces, and many more varieties each of which seems 

 to be entirely independent of the others. The factor ten is about 

 the only one absent from his tables of weights and measures, yet 

 he clings faithfully to the decimal system of numbers ! It looks as 

 if after having admitted the superiority of these numbers, his need 

 of order had been exhausted and he stopped short, discouraged, 

 on the road of improvement. 



When Uncle Christiaan had reached this point of the story — 

 the story which he was telling in order to instil into my soul the 

 noble virtue of patience — he became so enraged that he could 

 hardly master his feelings or choose his words: 'Think of it! Try 

 to visualize this great discovery made in India about the sixth 

 century, perfected in the Low Countries in the sixteenth, com- 

 pleted in France at the end of the eighteenth : one of the greatest 

 labor-saving discoveries which the human race has ever made. Can 

 you imagine that the nations which are in many respects the most 

 civilized of our own times have not yet grasped its importance? 

 The work of more than ten generations has not sufficed to con- 

 vince them with regard to a truth of the simplest and most ob- 

 jective kind! 



"It makes me mad to think of the time which the children must 

 need to become familiar with those grotesque assortments of 

 weights and measures. As if they were not yet sufficiently handi- 



* Except when measuring time and angles, when he uses sexagesimal fractions, because 

 the Babylonians wore such a deep rut with respect to these, some four thousand years ago, 

 that mankind has not yet been able to extricate itself from it. 



