726 
Sale of Corn bij Weight. 
the other at Paris, at whicli Mr. Yates, Mr. Chisholm, and 
Professor Leone Ijevi were the chief movers. The Select Com- 
mittee on Decimal Coinage sat in 1852-3, and the Decimal 
Coinage Commissioners from 1857 to 1859, when their final 
report was published, though further Parliamentary papers were 
published containing correspondence on the subject till 18GI. 
Amongst them is a joint resolution of the Senate and House 
of Representatives of the United States respecting the appoint- 
ment of a suitable person to confer with the proper functionaries 
in Great Britain with a view to the mutual arrangement of the 
coinage of the two countries, so that their units should be com- 
mensurable. 
It is certain that whatever may be the merits of the decimal 
system in facilitating calculations, and doing away with half the 
rules of arithmetic, it has made very little progress since that 
time in this country. In 1870, at the request of Professor 
Leone Levi, the Central Chamber of Agriculture appointed a 
small committee, of which Mr. Pell, M.P., Mr. Read, j\t.P., 
Colonel Tomline, M.P., and myself were members, to confer 
with a similar committee of the International Decimal Associ- 
ation, comprising Earl Fortescue, Mr. Smith, M.P., Mr. Yates, 
F.R.S., Mr. D'Eyncourt, Dr. Augustus Voelcker, and Professor 
Leone Levi. This joint committee presented a lengthy report 
urging the legalisation of a metric system of weights and 
measures in this country. At that time, and on more than 
one subsequent occasion, the Chambers of Agriculture re- 
solved in favour of the adoption of the cental as the standard 
weight. But the farmers of the Midlands, like the Corn Asso- 
ciation of Glasgow, are in favour of the hundredweight. On 
the cental question, I feel sure the Chambers did not represent 
the smaller farmers, most of whom have and use the 5G lb. and 
28 lb. weights. 
In 1882 Mr. Rankin introduced a Bill with the object of 
making the cental the uniform weight. Mr. Chamberlain, who 
was then President of the Board of Trade, being interviewed, at 
the same time, by two large deputations, one in favour of the 
cental and one equally strong in favour of the hundredweight, 
requested them to try to agree together before they came to the 
Government ; but he subsequently added the cental to the list 
of legalised weights in the Act of 1882, which fixed the 
imperial measured weights for the convenience of other 
weights for the corn returns. Since that time the cental can 
hardly be said to have made any appreciable progress beyond 
Liverpool, where it is used for trade with America, where 
the ton is a ton of 2,000 lb., and wheat is generally reckoned, 
