APPENDIX F LXXIX 
the weight of a litre of water at a certain temperature, is called a 
Kilogramme. The unit of land measurement is 10,000 square metres, 
called a Hectare. 
Unfortunately there has not been and never can be any reciprocal 
relationship between the English measures and the measures derived 
from such an initial unit; it is obvious, therefore, that unless it be pos- 
sible to secure desirable co-relationship by some change in the funda- 
mental units, there can be little hope of the metric system being adopted 
for general use on the northern continent of America and throughout 
the British Empire. 
Among the many distinguished men who within the last hundred 
years have studied the question with the view of finding a solution to 
the important international problem was John Quincy Adams, who three 
years before he became the sixth.president of the United States “drew up 
a report on weights and measures which is still a classic, and shows an 
almost incredible amount of investigation.” Much as he admired the 
metric system and approved of its conveniences for calculation result- 
ing from the decimal division, he pointed out that experience had 
proved that binary, ternary, duodecimal and sexagesimal divisions are 
as necessary in the practical and every day use of weights and measures 
as the decimal division, and that the people at large could ill afford 
to accept any system introducing the decimal division, if by so doing it 
became necessary to dispense with these other divisions. He was satis- 
fied that of all the nations of European origin the United States least 
required any such radical change in the system of weights and measures 
as that contemplated. 
The illustrious philosopher, Sir John Herschel, pointed out that 
the metre by no means fulfilled the requirements of scientific and ideal 
perfection. In 1863, he suggested as the conclusion reached by him that 
if parliament legislated at all on the subject, the enactment ought to be 
to increase the standard yard and of course all its multiples and sub- 
multiples by one precise thousandth part of the present length of each, 
and we should thus, he claimed, be in possession of a system of linear 
measurement, the purest and most ideally perfect imaginable. 
The late Dr. Barnard, president of Columbia College, New York, 
perhaps the ablest and strongest advocate of metrological reform, issued 
in 1879, a volume of 456 pages on the metric system of weights and 
measures. He very clearly demonstrated as follows:—(1), that the 
prevalence of a particular system is less important than the adoption 
of a common system by the several nations, of weights and measures ; 
(2), that if the world will have a common system, the choice must be 
between the metric system and that used in North America and through- 
