COMPARATIVE METROLOGY. 375 



house his fortress. He was to dig no deeper trench than he 

 could throw the earth out of with his spade, to raise the bottom of 

 the door no higher than his knee, to enclose himself by no wall 

 higher than a man on horseback could look over. Cases of 

 the limitation of jurisdiction by throwing a stone or shooting 

 an arrow from a given spot and noting where it falls, are men- 

 tioned by Grimm, and there is even now a ceremony of the same 

 kind at Cork, the mayor annually throwing a javelin into the 

 sea. The meaning of his doing so was doubtless in its origin 

 some determination of a boundary. 



Of popular pieces of metrology I may mention that I have 

 heard that a certain popular hymn-book passes current in Han- 

 over as a pound weight. For all these things picturesque and 

 inaccurate as they are, advancing civilization substitutes ab- 

 stract numerical determinations, but the natural tendency to 

 connect standards of different kinds with one another, and all 

 with natural objects, remains. For the foot or the fathom we 

 employ the length of the meridian or of the pendulum. It 

 may be quite true that as things now are it is better to trust 

 to standards accurately made and carefully preserved, but 

 the desire to recognize something ideal in practical life and 

 to connect ourselves with something less perishable than our 

 own handy-work, is not easily to be dismissed. How interest- 

 ing, says the report of the French Metrical Commission, for 

 the father of a family to know what proportion of the sur- 

 face of the earth is the field which supports his family ! The 

 remark is a little in the tone of the golden age of Rousseau, but 

 nevertheless it has its foundation in the realities of human 

 nature. 



4. What the historian of Metrology must do is, dismissing 

 general hypotheses, to observe the nature of the relations 

 which the popular mind seeks and establishes between different 

 standards, making large allowance both for popular inaccuracy 

 and for the love of simplicity. He must also observe the nature 

 of the traditions by which different standards are handed down, 

 and the greater or less respect in which they are held : the curse, 

 for instance, on him who removes a land-mark, and the unscru- 

 pulous way in which arbitrary governments have always dealt 

 with coinage. Then again with regard to what may be called 



