14 Scientific Proceedings, Royal Dublin Society. 



It will also make the teaching of weights and measures to 

 children both easier and more instructive. A yard, to the children 

 of the future, will simply be another name for nine-tenths of a 

 metre; an imperial gallon will be nine-tenths of the metric gallon, 

 or half dekalitre ; a pound avoirdupois will be nine-tenths of the 

 metric pound, or half kilogram ; an acre will be presented to them 

 by their teachers as a special name for the size of a strip of ground 

 forty metres wide and 100 long ; a mile, to them, will be another 

 name for 1,600 metres; and so on. These relations to metric 

 measures will then take the place of our present confusing tables 

 of weights and measures. They will be easier remembered, con- 

 vey more meaning, and dispense with a task which is at present 

 one of the most irksome in school education. As to the metric 

 tables, to which the imperial measures will be in the foregoing way 

 annexed, they teach themselves: they need no elaborate learning. 



Another further advantage is that, if these simple relations 

 between imperial and metric measures are called into existence by 

 Parliament, our posterity, reading books written now or heretofore,, 

 will find nothing in them that is unintelligible — descriptions of 

 distances in miles, of heights in feet, of weights in pounds or tons, 

 will be understood by them and will convey substantially the same 

 meaning to them then as they do to us now. 



It is perhaps the greatest merit of this proposal that the less 

 educated part of our population will not be sensibly affected by it. 

 To take the fifth of an inch off each foot, and half a quarter of an 

 ounce off each pound, will leave those measures so like what they 

 are at present, that the difference will scarcely be perceived, and 

 will not be felt after the change has once been made. Even the 

 price lists prepared under the present system need not be changed. 

 They may continue in use : everything will be adjusted by allow- 

 ing a discount of one penny in five shillings off the list price of 

 goods sold by the foot or yard, and a discount of one penny off 

 every half-guinea of the price of goods sold by the pound — or the 

 adjustment can be made in another way, by adding an inch to 

 every two yards in measuring lengths, and by adding an ounce to 

 every eight pounds in weighing. These are not too serious 

 burdens for Parliament to lay even upon our illiterate classes, in 

 order to bestow upon Englishmen at large and upon all our 

 posterity the great boon that is contemplated. 



