July 14, 1916] 



SCIENCE 



59 



ideas, is now being carried on — the results of 

 which will form the basis of future communi- 

 cations. L. D. Bristol 

 University of North Dakota, 

 April 28, 1916 



QUOTATIONS 



BUSINESS MEN WHO WANT THE METRIC 

 SYSTEM 



Nothing gives so much hope that the metric 

 system will some day be adopted in America 

 as the work now being done in its behalf by 

 the National Wholesale Grocers' Association. 

 It is their type of support which alone can 

 clinch the case in favor of the simpler stand- 

 ard. The theorists have done their best. They 

 have proved conclusively what saving in time 

 and labor, what gain in foreign trade, would 

 follow upon the adoption of the metric system. 

 Meanwhile, however, the country has been gen- 

 erally given to understand that practical men 

 opposed the change, that they thought it would 

 involve, while it was being made, insuperable 

 difficulties to trade and manufacture. The 

 wholesale grocers are practical men. In 

 countless daily transactions their business 

 would be directly affected by the change; they 

 would have to undergo whatever hardships 

 may accompany the shift in all its early days. 

 And yet the grocers say they want the metric 



Nor are the grocers content with wanting. 

 They are also doing all they can to hasten the 

 system's adoption, and in the measures they 

 are taking, the country can see what ways may 

 be followed in order to prepare for the change 

 and make it, when it comes, less difficult. In 

 pursuance of a report submitted by a special 

 committee to the convention in Boston, every 

 wholesale grocer is urged to print on the labels 

 of all canned and boxed good not only the 

 weight in English pounds and ounces, but also 

 the metric equivalent. This custom will have 

 two values. It will help to educate the Ameri- 

 can people in the metric system, and it will be- 

 gin at once to reap the benefits for American 

 goods abroad, especially in the South American 

 countries, which a general adoption of the 

 metric system promises. Furthermore, the 

 grocers are preparing for their membership 



complete and easily used tables of equivalents, 

 and are doing their utmost to show how the 

 first year or two of the change might be rend- 

 ered less difficult by their use. 



Psychologically, also, the study which these 

 practical men are making has its value to help 

 explain why the American passion for liberty 

 has never extended to open revolt against 

 slavery to the old English tables. They show 

 that children everywhere are being given a dis- 

 taste for the metric system by the way it is 

 presented to them in their study of arithmetic. 

 Since the schoolbooks necessarily present it in 

 relation to its equivalents in English weights 

 and measures, it means no more for them than 

 a new instrument of mental torture. Learned 

 for itself alone, it would offer no more diffi- 

 culty than the American money system gives 

 the boy who learns it in a day, and almost 

 without trying. Harnessed to the old English 

 equivalents, its true simplicity is not revealed. 

 From this poor start in school days, the Amer- 

 ican public appears to continue in amazing 

 ignorance of the metric system's real value. 



Very few men know, says the report to the 

 grocers, what time it would save in commercial 

 arithmetic and very few know the increasing 

 pressure for its adoption brought by the needs 

 of trade with countries which have it. If this 

 be so, then the grocers' committee's proposal, 

 that to their practical efforts there should be 

 added an organization exclusively designed to 

 educate the public on this subject, ought surely 

 to be furthered. — The Boston Transcript. 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 

 Who is Insane? By Stephen Smith, A.M., 



M.D., LL.D. The Macmillan Co., 1916. 



Not the least remarkable thing about this 

 very readable book is the fact that its author 

 is a nonagenarian. Dr. Smith was the state 

 commissioner in lunacy of New York from 

 1882 to 1888, and the present work largely em- 

 bodies his observations during those years, to- 

 gether with the deductions of his long experi- 

 ence concerning the big questions of the pre- 

 vention and treatment of mental disease. 



The word of criticism which might be offered 



