SHALL WE ADOPT THE METRIC SYSTEM? -^^-j 



cunning, or wisdom, but can be made the possession of any sober and 

 well-trained mind that has a sufficient endowment of the scientific sense 

 to recosrnize and submit to the inevitableness of law in all mental as in 

 all physical phenomena, and to subordinate, even in scientific research, 

 all feelincr and emotion to intellect and reason. 



The relation of this subject to delusions is also of much interest, both 

 psychological and practical ; during the present century especially the 

 prevailing follies of civilization have received an unusual and unpre- 

 cedented dignity and strength from the non-expert experiments of sci- 

 entific men with living human beings. It is a part of the inconsistency 

 of ignorance, and one of the effects of long breathing the atmosphere 

 of superstition, that the apostles of the demonstrably false, while they 

 uniformly dread and oppose the advance of their natural enemy, organ- 

 ized knowledge, yet pray for and welcome all mistakes of scientific men, 

 either in experiment or philosophy, as so much addition to their capi- 

 tal ; the weapons with which delusionists of every name prefer to fight 

 their battles are forged in scientific armories ; trace any one of the rank 

 and overrunning superstitions of our day to its utmost radicle, and it 

 will surely lead to sources where vi^e are wont to look for light and truth 

 — to some great discovery which our chemists, our naturalists, our as- 

 tronomers, of fair and noble fame, have evolved, or are believed to have 

 evolved, out of experiments that they have made, or tried to make, with 

 living human beings ; to the laboratory of some physiologist even, who 

 forgets that the chief fact in human life is the involuntary life ; to some 

 logician and philosopher, who has yet to learn that the habit of trusting 

 the senses, though endorsed and inculcated in all the universities of the 

 world, is the source of half the ignorance and not a little of the suffering 

 of mankind. 



■♦«» 



SHALL WE ADOPT THE METRIC SYSTEM? 



DURING the second session of the Forty-fifth Congress, a great 

 amount of evidence bearing on the question whether or not it 

 would be wise to introduce the metric system into the United States 

 was brought forward. This evidence is given in reports, etc., from the 

 heads of the various executive departments, and the most important 

 bureaus of the Government, and it is likely to remain buried in the vast 

 mass of fugitive public documents known only by the "printer's num- 

 ber." 



The editor has been at some pains to collect the scattered pieces 

 and reports, and to put them into a continuous if not a connected form, 

 with the object of making them available for reference in future. This it 

 seems amply worth while to do for various reasons ; chiefly because 



