52 



former as the common cubit ; while the royal cubit, in the 

 hands of Moses, became the cubit of the sanctuary (Deutero- 

 nomy iii, 11). 



The natural cubit, doubled, became the English yard, 

 which is the representative of the distance from the neck 

 to the tip of the middle finger when the arm is fully 

 extended : indeed, tradition, if not history, asserts that the 

 english standard yard was based upon the length of the arm 

 of King Henry VIII. Finally the distance between the 

 extremities of the middle fingers when both arms are fully 

 extended, or the double of the yard, constitutes the fathom 

 of six feet, and may terminate our sketch of the units of 

 length derived from the parts of man's body, thus literally 

 put forth as a measure of the extent of the physical 

 universe. 



Some specimens of the standard royal cubit, constructed 

 of hard wood, have been obtained from the catacombs of 

 Egypt, with the marks of subdivision in tolerable preserva- 

 tion ; and there is said to be one of these now in the 

 museum of Paris, one in that of Turin in Italy, one in 

 Vienna in Austria, and one in Berlin in Prussia. They 

 were evidently formed, as before stated, from the length of 

 the forearm with the hand added, being those of a man of 

 average proportions. From this royal or sacred standard 

 cubit of twenty-eight inches, all other measures were 

 deduced with the utmost simplicity and systematic uni- 

 formity in the egyptian system of measures and weights- 

 The square of the demicubit, or of fourteen inches, fur- 

 nished the unit of surface : its cube the unit of volume ; 

 and this volume, filled with water, gave the unit of weight, 

 and was identically the hebrew bath in liquid and epha in 

 dry measure. 



When we consider the very early period in man's history 

 at which the standard was devised, and the utter impracti- 

 cability at the time of a resort to astronomical data for 

 the determination of an exact basal unit of measure, we 



