Cbc 



journal of Pbarmacology, 



Devoted to the Advances Made in Materia Medica in its Branches. 



Pharmacy, Pharmacognosy, Chemistry, Botany, Pharmaco- 



Dynamics, Therapeutics and ToxicoIo§ry. 



Published for the Ahimni Association of the College of Pharmacy of the City of New York, 

 by The New Era Printing Company, 41 North Queen St., Lancaster, Pa. 



Vol. VII. AUaUSX, 19 00. No. 8. 



The Metric System.* l^^' 



By Rufus p. Williams. 

 President of the New England Association of Chemistry Teachers. 



The Metric System is a decimal system. The entire civilized world uses 

 the idecimal system of notation, and the fact that our arithmetic is 

 founded on the scale of ten is the main reason why our money, and our 

 weights and measures should also be reckoned on that scale. If our nota- 

 tion were duodecimai., then it would be advantageous (and as time 

 goes on and calculations become more complicated), imperative, that 

 money, lineal dimensions, volumes, weights, time units and all other meas- 

 urements should be expressed in the same duodecimal scale. 



The advantages of a duodecimal system over the decimal are usually 

 recognized among mathematicians, if for no other reason because 12 can 

 be divided by 2, 3, 4 and 6, whereas 10 is divisible by only 2 and 5. We 

 are told that if our ancestors had had 12 fingers instead of 10, our system 

 of notation would have been duodecimal. But the decimal scale of num- 

 bers is so strongly fixed on civilization that it will probably never be dis- 

 placed. Once let a people adopt its arithmetic scale, and fix its radix, 

 and every computation by arithmetic will eventually be forced into that 

 scale. And so the man who introduced the decimal notation into Europe 

 from Arabia, in the twelfth century, made it impossible for any system of 

 money, or of weights and measures other than the decimal to subserve the 

 best interests of mankind. This statement seems too nearly axiomatic to 



■• A paper read at a meeting of the American Chemical Society, June, 1900. 

 Issued in pamphlet form by The Decimal Association, Botolph House, Eastcheap, 

 London, E. C— [Ed.] 



