146 ANIMALCULAR LIFE. 
fornia sequoia to him. He borrows his inch from the breadth 
of his thumb, his palm and span from the width of his hand and 
the spread of his fingers, his foot from the length of the organ 
so named; his cubit is the distance from the tip of his middle 
finger to his elbow, and his fathom is the space he can measure 
with his outstretched arms.* To a being who instinctively 
finds the standard of all magnitudes in his own material frame, 
all objects exceeding his own dimensions are absolutely great, 
all falling short of them absolutely small. Hence we habitu- 
ally regard the whale and the elephant as essentially large and 
therefore important creatures, the animalcule as an essentially 
small and therefore unimportant organism. Dut no geological 
formation owes its origin to the labors or the remains of the huge 
mammal, while the animalcule composes, or has furnished, the 
substance of strata thousands of feet in thickness, and extend- 
ing, in unbroken beds, over many degrees of terrestrial surface. 
If man is destined to inhabit the earth much longer, and to ad- 
vance in natural knowledge with the rapidity which has marked 
his progress in physical science for the last two or three centu- 
* The French metrical system seems destined to be adopted throughout the 
civilized world. It is indeed recommended by great advantages, but it is very 
doubtful whether they are not more than counterbalanced by the selection of 
too large a unit of measure, and by the inherent intractability of all decimal 
systems with reference to fractional divisions. The experience of the whole 
world has established the superior convenience of a smaller unit, such as the 
braccio, the cubit, the foot, and the palm or span, and in practical life every 
man finds that he has much more frequent occasion to use a fraction than a 
multiple of the metre. Of course, he must constantly employ numbers ex- 
pressive of several centimetres or millimetres instead of the name of a single 
smaller unit than the metre. Besides, the metre is not divisible into twelfths, 
eighths, sixths, or thirds, or the multiples of any of these proportions, two of 
which at ieast—the eighth and the third—are of as frequent use as any other 
fractions. The adoption of a fourth of the earth’s circumference as a base 
for the new measures was itself a departure from the decimal system. Had 
the Commissioners taken the entire circumference as a base, and divided it 
into 100,000,000 instead of 10,000,000 parts, we should have had a unit of 
about sixteen inches, which, as a compromise between the foot and the eubit, 
would haye been much better adapted to universal use than so large a unit as 
the metre. 
