346 Weights and Measures Question Reconsidered. ["June, 
we forget where to put the decimal point, and of course get 
bewildered ! 
It may be said that centesimal and millesimal reckoning 
becomes easy to the great mass of the public with pra(5tice. 
Experience does not prove this to be the case. A writer, 
whose name we forget, has pointed out — what any traveller 
in France may verify for himself — that when the process of 
ticket-giving begins at a French railway-station, an official 
takes his stand at the window to tell the booking-clerk within 
and the passenger without what two and a half return tickets 
at 1 franc 65 centimes come to. French money would be 
much easier added up if, instead of two columns only for 
francs and centimes, there were three, for francs, tenths of 
francs (which I may provisionally call pence), and centimes. 
Again, it is a remarkable faCt that in all the countries 
which have adopted the metric system, vulgar fractions, 
though denounced as heterodox, creep in. Who has not 
heard, in the shop of a French grocer, &c., customers 
asking for a “ mi-kilo. ” of sugar or coffee ? Indeed, in some 
countries which have adopted the metric system, this 
“ mi-kilo.” (= about 17 ounces) figures as a metric pound. 
In receipts and formulae of all kinds I very frequently find 
such quantities as the quarter, the third, and even the 
thirty-second, of a litre specified. 
Sir John Herschel maintained, not without grounds, that 
successive halving is an instinctive propensity of man, and 
that consequently any system which discards halves, 
quarters, and eighths must be regarded as unnatural. Of 
this we have a very good instance in the 112, 56, 28, 14, 7, 
and 3J lb. weights used in warehouses and shops, and it is 
said that some tradesmen have even memorialised the au- 
thorities to allow the use of a if lb. weight ! 
The nomenclature and the notation of the metric system 
seem to me to want reorganising. It requires plain, short, 
simple names for its various grades, to be expressed in such 
a manner as to banish the decimal point beyond all ordinary 
transactions. It needs, too, terms for the half, the fourth, 
&c., of its chief denominations. The various names, so 
long as they express one and the same thing, need not be 
identical in different languages. If we call the 17 oz. weight 
pound in English, livre in French, lira in Italian, and pfund 
in German, any one of these terms is surely more convenient 
than 500 grammes. 
It has been said that the universal adoption of the metric 
system would facilitate business. But it should not be 
forgotten that, in consequence of the development of 
