932 Transactions of the American Institute. 



a foot, they all had a pound, etc. At first sight it would seem very 

 remarkable that' when everybody had the same names for these stan- 

 dards, nevertheless not even in towns thirty miles apart on the con- 

 tinent of Europe did those names mean the same thing. 



How did it happen that measures grew up all so different and yet 

 all called by the same name ? The reason appears plainly when we 

 consider the early history of the derivation of measures. To begin 

 with measures of length, most of these were derived from some part 

 of the person of man ; for instance, the extent of the arms was a 

 fathom ; the yard measure was the girth of man, the circumference of 

 his body ; the foot measure came from the human foot ; the ell was 

 the distance from the elbow to the end of the finger ; the cubit used 

 by Noah in building the ark was the same. 



These measures originated without forethought or method. Each 

 man made his own measures. When societies began to find different 

 measures in the same neighborhood, they were adjusted by the 

 measures of some distinguished man, a chief or king. The foot made 

 its first appearance in Greece, and was first derived from Hercules ; 

 if you go back to the time of the Israelites in Palestine, every city 

 was the head-quarters of a kingdom ; and so it was in Italy soon after 

 the founding of Rome.- All the early Roman wars were with powers 

 scarcely a day's march from the city. Down to the middle ages the 

 whole of Europe was divided up into little principalities, and each 

 had its own separate system of weights and measures. 



In regard to measures of capacity, although they were not derived 

 from the human person they were got up with as little forethought or 

 method. Some convenient natural vessel was chosen, such as a cocoa- 

 nut-shell or an egg-shell, or the shell of a gourd ; and each commu- 

 nity had its own measures. 



Measures of weight are not adapted to every primitive society ; but 

 measures of length are necessary even in barbarous society, and there- 

 fore originated at a time when people did not think at all about 

 science or methods. The weights were made to correspond with some 

 convenient measure of capacity. The Saxon weights were actually 

 •derived from the weight of a fluid or grain in a measure of capacity. 

 But people soon found that when they weighed a given measure full 

 of wine, and the same measure full of grain, the grain was the 

 lightest Accordingly, there were two kinds of weights. 



The measure of grain gave Troy weight, and the measure of wine 

 gave avoirdupois weight. If you took equal weights, the measure of 

 corn would be larger than the measure of wine. Hence, there arose 



