702 PROF. C. p. SMYTH ON THE REPUTED METROLOGICAL SYSTEM 



APPENDIX 11. 



Colonel Strange' s Measure of the Exchequer Queen Elizabeth's Standard Ell. 



The extreme closeness of the present legal British inch to the ancient Pyramid, 

 and truly earth-commensurable inch, is one of the best proved, as well as most 

 interesting features of the preceding inquiry ; yet, rather astonishing to say, the 

 approximation was once, and might have been now much closer, except for an 

 accident, or rather an erroneous step among certain high parties ; the case being 

 this : — 



The present legal inch is merely the gijjth part of the Parliamentary standard 

 and unit yard. Originally, the inch itself seems to have been the unit ; and the 

 yard, or any other standard, merely such and such a number of the units strung 

 together for some temporary purpose of convenience. 



The smallness of this inch unit, and its easy approximate identification by a 

 thumb's breadth, were eminently appropriate to the conditions which should be 

 preserved in metrical units for the poor and working classes, while its even 

 earth's axis commensurability was the most admirable feature for all religious 

 and intellectual minded men to contemplate. In the days of Queen Elizabeth, 

 something of this belief appears still to have lingered among the officers of 

 Government ; and, therefore, when desired to deposit in the Exchequer an example 

 of the national linear measure, the officers concerned placed there two long 

 standards, one of them composed of 36, and the other of 45, of the unit inches, 

 under the names of the yard and the ell ; the mutual incommensurability of which, 

 except through the medium of inches, seemed almost intended to call attention 

 to the inch as the unit, though the yard and the ell themselves might be useful 

 as standards. 



These standards remain at the Exchequer to this day ; and one of them, the 

 yard, has been the parent, through means of a series of copies begun in 1742, 

 of the present standard yard of Parliament. Why the gentlemen employed by 

 Government, from 1742 downwards, chose to be guided entirely by one of the 

 Elizabeth standards, and to throw the other overboard, although scientifically, 

 from its greater length, and historically also, it ought to have been even more 

 attended to than the other, I have never heard explained ; but at present we 

 have only to do with the fact, and endeavour to ascertain what would have been 

 the result to the nation, if the larger and, in early times, the more popular 

 standard, i.e., the ell, had been employed to give the length of the present parlia- 

 mentary inch. 



To this end reference may be made to Mr Daily's excellent historic paper in 



