934 Transactions of the American Institute. 



have so large and so homogeneous a country that we have not felt the 

 necessity to be so urgent, and we are behind them ; but the modem 

 increased facilities for traveling and intercommunication between 

 nations are bringing us up to the desire for a common system. A 

 century ago, however, the spirit of reform did not exist in the slightest 

 degree. The people had not thought of such a thing as changing 

 their weights and measures. They looked on the existing system as 

 they would on dispensations of Providence, and they would as soon 

 have thought of changing the weather or the climate. 



When the idea of change first originated, one would suppose that 

 it would have come from men who had to deal with weights and 

 measures every day. But the familiarity of such persons with these 

 things made them insensible of the possibility of getting rid of the 

 confusion ; and the idea that there might be a reform sprang up first 

 with an individual of a class having of all men the least to do with 

 weights and measures, an ecclesiastic ; who in his closet thought out 

 the remedy, and whose plan was laid before the French Assembly a 

 short time before the French revolution. Had it not been for the 

 extreme violence of the course pursued by the radicals, in overthrow- 

 ing their monarchy and setting up a republic in which nobody was 

 permitted to be free, I suppose the nations of Europe would have 

 agreed to the proposition, and a convention would have been called 

 which would have soon settled upon a common basis. 



In order to determine accurately the fundamental measure of the 

 new system proposed in France, since called the metric system, it was 

 necessary that there should be an elaborate measurement made of a 

 great arc of the meridian, the ten-millionth part of a meridional 

 quadrant having been adopted as the meter. This measurement took 

 seven years. After this measurement had been made, France again 

 invited the nations to convene, by their representatives, to verify the 

 determination. The representatives of Holland, Denmark, Switzer- 

 land, Italy, Spain, and some of the governments of Germany, came 

 together and established definitively the value of the meter-base. 

 This value was officially adopted in 1799 by France, where the metric 

 system had already been legalized ; and since that time, in Russia, 

 Austria, Sweden and Denmark (which have never yet adopted the 

 system) all the scientific journals have used that system. 



No system can be so useful as a decimal system. Our federal cur- 

 rency illustrates that. Every child can perform operations in the 

 decimal currency without difficulty. We need not throw aside the 

 convenient divisions by two. We have not thrown them aside in oui 



