55 
THE METRIC SYSTEM FOR BRITISH USE. 
(Wire Lantern Sxives.) 
By S. JACKSON, M.A. (Oxon.) I1th November, 1902. 
Though the metric system is associated with the French, and 
that to two Frenchmen the honour of having developed it must 
ever belong, yet it is something gratifying to our patriotism to | 
remember that it was James Watt who really suggested the 
decimalisation of weights and measures. If our Parliament had 
been as wide awake at the early part of the Nineteenth Century 
as they pretend to be now, they would have accepted James 
Watt’s proposal, and we should have been the leaders in 
Metrical reform. But the French National Assembly took up 
the subject, and authorised five of, perhaps, the greatest 
mathematicians that ever lived, to develop the Metric decimal 
system. 
If the Metric system errs at all it is in the care bestowed on 
science and the neglect shown to commerce. These mathemati- 
cians were not business men. They had special care for science 
and not quite as much for commerce. 
Tables on the Metric system were then thrown on the screen 
and explained in detail by the Lecturer. 
The lecturer observed that the tables were connected intimately 
with one another by extremely simple relations, and there were 
a variety of forms for putting the system before the people. One 
result of the introduction of the decimal system of coinage and a 
Metric system of weights and measures would be that all com- 
pound rules would disappear—compound addition, subtraction, 
multiplication and division. The advantage of the decimal could 
not be exaggerated. 
If we had the Metric system we should have to alter all our 
mile stones—and that would be a great expense; the height of 
persons would be expressed in centimetres, and not in feet and 
inches ; instead of a horse being so many “ hands” high, it would 
have to be expressed in decimetre ; the cricket pitch would have 
