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Proceedings of the Royal Society 
men or nations at the time it was first produced, or within several 
thousand years thereof, could have possibly thought of for them- 
selves.” Besides, adds he elsewhere, “ an extraordinary (sic) con- 
venient length, too, for man to handle and use in the common affairs 
of life is the one ten-millionth of the earth’s semi-axis of rotation 
when it comes to be realised, for it is extremely close to the ordi- 
nary human arm, or to the ordinary human pace in walking with a 
purpose to measure.” 
Of course, all these inferences and reasonings, regarding the 
Sacred Cubit being an exact segment of the polar axis, disappear 
when we find Sir Isaac Newton’s length of the sacred cubit is 
not, as Professor Smyth elects it to be, 25*025 British inches ; nor 
25' 07 as he calculated it to be from the mean of the nine quan- 
tities in his table ; nor 25*29, as is the actual mean of these nine 
quantities ; but, “ according to Sir Isaac Newton’s” own reiterated 
statement and conclusion, 24*82. A Sacred Cubit, according to 
Sir Isaac Newton’s admeasurements of it of 24*82 inches, would 
not, by hundreds of cubits, be one ten-millionth of the measure of 
the semi-polar axis of the earth ; provided the polar axis be, as Pro- 
fessor Smyth elects it to be, 500,500,000 British inches. 
Axis of the Earth as a Standard of Measure. 
The standards of measure in most modern civilised countries are, 
as is well known, referred to divisions of arcs of the meridian, 
measured off upon different points of the surface of the earth. 
These measures of arcs of the meridian, as measurements of a 
known and selected portion of the surface of the spheroidal globe 
of the earth, have, more or less, fixed mathematical relations with 
the axis of the earth ; as the circumference of a sphere has an exact 
mathematical ratio to its diameter. The difference in length of 
arcs of the meridian at different parts of the earth’s surface, in 
consequence of the irregular spheroidal form of the globe of the 
earth, has led to the idea that the polar diameter or axis of the 
earth would form a more perfect and more universal standard than 
measurements of the surface of the earth. In the last century, 
Cassini* and Calletf proposed, on these grounds, that the polar 
* “ Traite de la Grandeur et de la Figure de la Terre.” Amsterdam 
edition (1723), p. 195. 
t “Tables Portatives de Logarithmes.” Paris, 1795, p. 100. 
