234 REPORTS ON THE STATE OF SCIENCE.—1917. 
Roman Empire. It is the extraordinary instance of an international coin, which 
drove all the Roman coins out of the market, and practically took charge ot 
Kuropean trade until Pepin’s Government, 1 suppose, became organised and 
started making coins that were of different weights. Another thing that is ct 
great interest to us—particularly when we think of decimal coinage and of Mr. 
Gladstone’s celebrated attack on decimai coinage because of the working man’s 
interest in the penny, and what he called the dishonest proposal of decreasing 
the penny, which would take place, of course, if the sovereign were divided into 
one thousand parts—I understand that there were no copper coins in use in 
England (no copper coins made) until the time of the Georges. All the coinage 
used throughout the country was silver or gold; and the scales business throws a 
great deal of light upon it. As a matter of fact, coins in those days were in no 
sense tokens. '1'o-day the coin is a promissory note, to be redeemed by the King 
in gold. The reason why Pepin’s denarius continued was that it was exactly 
the value in silver that it was represented to be; its purchasing power was 
according to the silver it contained. Apparently, it was a great thing for a 
Government to introduce a copper coin; it needed a very powerful Government, 
and one which had a reputation for redeeming its promissory notes, to issue 
bronze coins. It would be rather interesting to hear from Mr. Sheppard what 
were the controlling factors which led to the issuing of bronze coinage, which 
apparently was unknown in the earlier stages of our civilisation. Another thing 
that was mentioned by Mr. Sheppard was very interesting from a coinage- 
reform point of view, and that is the use of the Black Art in trade by the 
assistance or connivance of difficult systems of weights and coinage. The 
curious custom of the draper of pricing goods at 1s. 11$d. is one which is 
admirably justified by the result. He can produce an effect by 1s. 113d. which 
is not produced by Zs. I have been interested in the fact that at a Congress 
here in London in 1911 agriculturists decided practically unanimously in favour 
of decimal coinage, a remarkable thing for tarmers. The reason given was 
that a farmer has to study so many things that he cannot be an expert in 
weights and measures. At Cardiff an enthusiastic flour-miller produced a book 
in which there were 800 pages devoted to nothing but weights and measures 
used in the corn trade in various markets in England and Wales. When a farmer 
has not time to study this 600 or 800 page book, another man gets ahead of him, 
This is one of the reasons from the commercial point of view why it is all- 
important we should adapt the decimal system to coinage. 
I have come from Australia, and I have preached the metric system over 
there; but when I came to this country I got rather a shock. Since then I have 
been trying to use metric measures everywhere that I can, to see what is the 
effect. Now after three months I go back to inches, which I had used all my life, 
with difficulty. A gentleman, our chairman at a meeting in Bath recently, 
is a jeweller, and he told us a most extraordinary thing. Some three years ago 
a bolt out of the blue came to the jewellers in the shape of a ukase from the 
Board of Trade, or something similar, saying that they must no longer use 
the old carat divided into halves and fourths and eighths and sixteenths; 
they should use the metric carat, and it should be decimally divided. An 
indignation meeting was held. Sitting up one night, at the end of fifteen 
minutes dhe jeweller had mastered the new system, and at the end of the week 
he would not have used anything else. His assistants were of the same 
opinion, and they sometimes look back on the old system as a joke. This 
shows that once you introduce decimal methods they will drive out the 
farrago of old weights that has been growing through the centuries in all 
the different countries. In a little country part of Germany, in Hanover, 
which at that time was under the Kings of England, they had some coins 
called groschen. One of the Kings of England tried an improvement, 
and introduced what was called the new groschen. For something like one 
hundred and fifty years the new and old groschen existed side by side, 
and when something else was introduced in 1870 the new and old groschen 
were gone in two years. I think that is the hope for this country—that the 
new system will drive out the old. It has not succeeded in driving everything 
out of France. One of the reasons of that is that we took into France 
machinery and other things on the old measures, and we purchased from 
be art 
