MANUAL WORK. 383 



boxes, or the gross ; the metre, the centimetre, 

 the kilometre, and so on), is not impressed on the 

 mind, and therefore when the children come to 

 the decimal fractions they are at a loss to under- 

 stand them. In this country, the United States 

 and Russia, instead of accepting the decimal 

 system, which is the system of our numeration, 

 they still torture the children by making them 

 learn a system of weights and measures which 

 ought to have been abandoned long since. The 

 pupils lose at that full two years, and when they 

 come later on to problems in mechanics and 

 physics, schoolboys and schoolgirls spend most 

 of their time in endless calculations which only 

 fatigue them and inspire in them a dislike of 

 exact science. But even there, where the decimal 

 measures have been introduced, much time is lost 

 in school simply because the teachers are not 

 accustomed to the idea that every measure is 

 only approximate, and that it is absurd to cal- 

 culate with the exactitude of one gramme, or 

 of one metre, when the measuring itself does not 

 give the elements of such an exactitude. Where- 

 as in France, where the decimal system of meas- 

 ures and money is a matter of daily life, even 

 those workers who have received the plainest 

 elementary education are quite familiar with 

 decimals. To represent twenty-five centimes, 

 or twenty-five centimetres, they write " zero 



