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THE FARMER'S MAGAZINE. 



its application to all the purposes of civilized man, than 

 that now employed in the French empire. 



In England, the necessity of a fixed and uniform standard 

 was felt and acknowledged at a verj' earlj' peiind. In the 

 Anglo-Saxon times, so early as the reign of King Edgar, 

 about a hundred years before the Norman Conquest, a law 

 was made requiring that a set of weights and measures 

 should be kept at Winchester, then the capital of the king- 

 dom, by which those employed at other places should be 

 regulated. The troublesome and distracted state of the 

 nation in after-times probably occasioned this law to be 

 neglected. At all events great irregularities existed, and 

 were complained of in tht time of King Henry I., the son 

 of the Conqueror, at least as regarded the unit of length ; 

 to obviate them, he made a law that the length of his own 

 right arm should be the standard yard for his dominions. 

 This provision also failed to produce the needful uniformity. 

 In Magua Charta, which was signed in the reign of Henry's 

 great-grandson, King .John, it was stipulated bj' the list 

 section that there should be only one weight and one mea- 

 sure throughout the whole realm. In later times it was 

 enacted by Parliament that a standard yard, a standard 

 pound troy, and a standard gallon— all made of brass, under 

 the direction of commissioners appointed for the purpose — 

 should be kept in the costody of the Speaker of the House 

 of Commons; that compared copies of them should be 

 lodged in several important towns ; and that all legal 

 weights and measures should be conformed to them. The 

 originals were lost by the fire which consumed the old 

 House of Commons, in the autumn of 18.34 ; but the certi- 

 fied copies, which had been made with as much care and 

 accuracy as the standards themselves, still exist ; and, so 

 far as these three magnitudes are concerned, I have never 

 heard a complaint of any want of uniformity throughout 

 the United Kingdom. But there are, nevertheless, evils 

 and imperfections in our existing systems of measures 

 which, in my opinion, loudly call for a remedj', and to which 

 it seems strange, and almost inconceiviible, that the com- 

 mercial community of Great Britain and Ireland should 

 have submitted even for a single year. Some of these I 

 shall now endeavour to point out. 



In the first place, it is to be remarked that three important 

 portions of our system are quite independent of each other — 

 I allude to the measures of weight, length, and capacity. The 

 pound has nothing to do with the yard, nor the yard to the 

 imperial gallon. There are thus three distinct and separate 

 standards ; whereas, if a more rational method had been fol- 

 lowed, one would have been sufficient, from which all the rest 

 could easily have been derived. Secondly, all these standards 

 are purely artificial and arbitrary ; there is nothing in nature 

 th»t corresponds to any one of them, or from which they can 

 in any simple or elegant manner be derived. I defy any man 

 to give to another, by intelligible words, an exact idea of the 

 length of a yard or the weight of a pound, otherwise than by 

 placing specimens of these quantities before him. Hence, if 

 our present weights and measures were lost, they could not 

 possibly be recoveied ; nor could future ages have any notion 

 of quantities expressed in terms derived from our existing 

 standards. Thirdly, the divisions of our scale, or rather of 

 our manifold scales, are arbitrary, capricious, perplexing, and 

 in most cases inconvenient, to a degree that foreigners, accus- 

 tomed to a simple and elegant system, find it difficult to com- 

 prehend. This is the circumstance which makes the study of 

 commercial arithmetic so difficult and disgusting. There arc 

 very few pupils who can learn arithmetic tolerably well in less 

 than three years ; in most cases it requires four to master iti 



even under an abte teacher and with the best existing text- 

 books ; whereas, if a proper division of cur money, weights, 

 and measures were introduced, I affirm, without hesitation, 

 that all the knowledge that is contained in Dr. Thomson's 

 arithmetic could easily be acquired in a twelve-month, and 

 when so acquired could never be forgotten. Let me illustrate 

 this by a specimen of the sub-division of some of the larger 

 units of the scale, showing the multipliers which are to be 

 used in bringing them to a lower denomination, as it is called: 

 of course, in bringing lower to higher denominations, the mul- 

 tipliers become divisors in inverted order. 



lu reducing money, that is to say, the denominations of 

 money in which accounts are kept — for the coins are far more 

 numerous, and their sub-divisions go upon a different principle 

 altogether— the multipliers are successively 20> 12, and 4. la 

 reducing a mile to its sub-divisions in this country, the multi- 

 pliers are 8, 40, 7, 3, 12, and 3. In reducing a ton, the mul- 

 tipliers are 20, 4, 28, and 16; for another sort of ton, the 

 multipliers are 20, 4, 30, and 10 ; for another sort of ton, 21, 

 4, 28. In reducing a yard, a carpenter uses as multipliers, 3, 

 12, and 8; but a draper, 4 and 4. A grocer, in bringing his 

 pound to a lower denomination, uses ns multipliers 16 and 

 16; a goldsmith reduces his pound by 20 and 21; and an 

 apothecary his by 8 and 30. Moreover, these pounds, and 

 the ounces of which they consist, are of different weights ; the 

 goldsmith's pound is lighter than the grocer's, but his ounce 

 is heavier ; and not one person in ten thousand knows the 

 ex!?ct proportion between them. In the measure of 

 surfaces, the statute acre is successively reduced to its 

 lower denominations, by tjie multipliers, 4, 40, 30i ; the 

 perch by oOj, 9, and 144. To take one out of many of the 

 ways of calculating capacity, we may select the authorized 

 division of the quarter of corn. It is to be reduced into Rs 

 lower component parts by multiplying by 8, 4, 2, 4, 2, and 4. 

 And as to the divisions of the bushel and the gallon, they are 

 so various and so perplexing that I could not venture to set 

 them forth without exposing myself to the chaftee, or rather 

 to the certainty, of falling into some mistake ; I might 

 make myself ridiculous, and tl'.erefore I desist. There 

 are men whose heads can hold all this, and more — perhaps five 

 times as much more of the same kind — which the existing 

 syatera requires to be borne in mind — and can hold it without 

 mistake, confusion, or difficulty ; I confess myself unable to 

 do so. Do not suppose ihat I have written the foregoing 

 figures down from memory : nothing of the sort ; I have copied 

 them from that excellent work. Dr. Thomson's arithmetic ; 

 there I feel a full assurance that all is quite correct ; and if 

 there be any mistake, put it down to my inadvertence or 

 stupidity. I find it not easy to remember these things; but 

 consider how difficuU it is to work them out ; snd consider 

 that accounts and calculations involving accuracy in all these 

 details, and their comparison with one another, are required 

 perhaps a hundred times a day in ! 0,000 counting-houses in 

 the United Kingdom, and yon will understand the impedi- 

 diment thrown in the way of tr.".de and mantifactures. There 

 is not a house-painter or a plasterer in a score that can measure 

 his own work, or can tell, without the help of a professional 

 measurer, how much an empl"yer, who I as contracted with 

 him at so much by the square yard, is in his debt : in France, 

 any child who can perform simple muUiplication can do it 

 with ease. With us, it is still more difficult for a stone-mason, 

 who is piid by what is called a solid perch (which, however, is 

 not 8 solid perch at all), to tell the amount of his own earnings : 

 but if we bad the French system, the calculation would be as 

 easy as the former. 1 ha.l thoughts of working some of these 

 calculations to which I have referred with chalk, upon a black 



