Sale of Corn hy Weight. 
decimal system and the hundredweight. To avoid this, the 
Corn Sales Committee of the Central Chamber of Agriculture 
have suggested for consideration whether uniformity might 
hot be attempted first through the hundredweight, as being 
the -weight more familiar to farmers, and then, conceding, as the 
Glasgow Corn Association suggested, that the decimal system 
may be theoretically the best, look forward to taking the 
second step when education has advanced sufficiently for the 
English nation to be convinced, which they are not at present, 
that the time is ripe for a further change. 
We have to consider what the hundredweight has to recom- 
mend its adoption beyond the fact that it, or the half hundred- 
weight, is found in most farmers' houses. Why did our fore- 
fathers use a hundredweight of 112 lb., instead of 100 lb., as a 
new country probably would ? The answer is that the oldest 
weight was the stone of 14 lb., and the 112 lb. is a multiple 
of 14. It is a great argument in favour of the more general use 
of the hundredweight that imported grain is reckoned by the 
hundi'edweight by the Board of Trade, though translated as well 
into equivalent quarters, which are placed side by side with the 
hundredweights in the official publications. Major Craigie 
informs me that the register duty on wheat taken off by Mr. 
Lowe, which produced a million and a half of revenue, was a 
duty of 3(1. a huiadredweight, not Is. a quarter, as often stated. 
The Committee of 1834 stated fully the importance to the 
community of correct and intelligible quotations of corn, on 
which point all agriculturists are probably agreed. It reported 
in favour of legislative interference to effect this. In 1881 we 
have seen the competition was between two weights, the cental 
and the hundredweight. The advocates of measure, or of 
weight and measure, or of measured weight, put in no appearance 
on the occasion of the two rival deputations to Mr. Chamberlain. 
The unknown problem to men in the Midlands seems to be the 
extent to which any of these principles are and will be supported 
in the Eastern counties. ^ 
I believe the merchants and corn dealers in Norfolk prefer 
buying barley by weight, but that the sellers prefer selling 
malting barley by measure, because it is often light. The 
dealer often decides whether it is to be sold by weight or 
measure, as suits him. This view in favour of measure may 
be more or less common to five Eastern counties, but it is re- 
stricted to only the one cereal, barley. As to the amount 
of error to which measure and weiglit are respectively 
liable, it may be taken from experiments recently made at the 
Standards Office that the maximum probable error of measure- 
