Sale of Corn hij Weight. 
727 
I believe, by the qinntal, the quarter of the ton. This, by the 
way, confirms the remark made by Lord Overstone and his 
friends in 1857, and repeated by Mr. Chaney in his evidence 
of 1891, as to the tendency of the human mind to "halving," 
that is to deal in halves and quarters, so that 3 as the 
quarter of 12 is preferable to 2\, the quarter of 10, which in- 
volves a fraction. Lord Overstone made light of the different 
systems of foreign countries, as these, he said, mainly affect 
merchants who can easily manage the calculations necessary for 
international transactions. The statistician had not come to 
the front so much in that day as since, when it is found utterly 
impossible for him to compare with any correctness the produce 
of countries like France, which make their returns in both weight 
and measure, and others which make returns, some in weight, 
and others in measure, without saying why they prefer the one 
system to the other, or letting us know what the measure means ; 
or again, to compare estimates of foreign produce with our own 
agricultural statistics. In regard to these it may be observed 
that an estimate of the produce is sent in by English farmers by 
measure, without any intimation of what that measure means 
in their locality, whilst the Irish farmers make their returns by 
the hundredweight, which everyone understands. In regard to 
cheese, however, the hundredweight aggravatingly appears as 
120 lb., the reason being that it is convenient to reckon, because 
\d. per lb. makes half a sovereign. 
There are two remarks founded on the past experience of 
those who have strongly advocated the introduction of the 
decimal system into England which, perhaps, may be intro- 
duced here. The one is that those who so strenuously exerted 
themselves in its favour a generation ago were of opinion, I be- 
lieve, that it would have been wiser to have made an attempt 
first to decimalise the weights rather than the coinage of the 
country, though from the unanimous opposition I have found to 
the cental at Mark Lane, and the little progress this weight has 
made beyond Liverpool, even in Lancashire, I do not think much 
success would have been achieved with the English corn trade. 
The second most obvious remark is that the French nomen- 
clature of the metric system would never be tolerated in this 
country except amongst statisticians and other scientific men. 
To convince ourselves on this point we have only to consider 
what would be the effect of our going to a country market and 
asking for a kilogramme, or a half kilo, the half being the most 
usual form in which the decimal system is used in business. I 
draw attention to these points because it is important that there 
should be no conflict again between the supporters of the 
