l82 CELESTIAL MEASURINGS AND WEIGHINGS. 



sides, or to half the height of the altar of incense. And 

 the same is true of similar representatives of the most 

 commonly received units of weight and measure of 

 capacity. What the original type might be, which such 

 standard professed to represent, matters little. The 

 inhabitants of a nation might agree to use for their unit 

 of length the foot of one of their ancient heroes, or the 

 hundredth part of the height of their principal church, 

 or the hundred thousandth part of the extreme breadth 

 of their country from sea to sea. But as these objects 

 could never be appealed to for the settlement of any 

 practical dispute between man and man, or to convict 

 the user of any fraudulent measure, a material and pro- 

 ducible object must exist in some safe custody, carefully 

 preserved, or safe in its received sanctity, from damage ; 

 and authoritatively declared, and generally believed to 

 be, rigorously equal in length to its prototype ; and to 

 have been, at some period, however remote, ascertained 

 to be so by some appropriate process of comparison ; or, 

 at all events, by the exact copying of some former and 

 lost standard so compared. And from the moment of 

 such authoritative declaration, the length of this material 

 representative necessarily becomes the real and legal 

 unit of length. The hero may turn out, on a close and 

 irreverent scrutiny of history, to have been a purely 

 mythical personage; the church may have been con- 

 sumed by fire ; the breadth of the land diminished by the 

 encroachments of the sea : but so long as the standard 

 remains uninjured by rough usage, and secured from loss 

 by a sufficient multiplication of authentic copies, its 



