[ Read before the Texas Academy of Science, June 15, 
PEDAGOGICAL NOTE ON MENSUEATION, 
By Arthur Lefevre, C. E. 
Although original scientific research must ever he the crowning 
function of the Texas Academy of Science, aims of humbler service, 
standing among its express purposes, display the widest human sym- 
pathy. In particular, it is part of the benign role of Science to con- 
sider with cordial interest all matters of true pedagogic import. For, 
while justly impatient with the shallowness and bombast which so much 
abound in the literature of pedagogy, the true man of science is quick 
to appreciate any genuine elucidation or simplification, however minute, 
whereby the pathway of learners may he smoothed or straightened. 
It is my purpose in this brief note to point out what I believe to he a 
helpful idea in the pedagogic aspect of geometric mensuration. , 
I have not failed to examine the matter with a view to discovering 
whether it had import strictly scientific; hut it seems clear that the 
current scientific conventions for the unit-surface and the unit-solid 
have intrinsic fitness and utilities superior to those which would he 
afforded by any others. 
In a little hook called Questions in Mathematics, J. C. Smith, Brook- 
lyn, N. Y., 1889, one may find a curiously confused plea for a revolu- 
tion in our choice of units for the measurement of surfaces and solids. 
The author seems to know more of the ordinary school or formal logic 
than of mathematics, hut has illogically based his arguments on mystical 
and inept analogons in what may he called graphical logic. His san- 
guine questions concerning the advantages to scientific mensuration of 
changing the essential form of our units for surfaces and solids appear 
to me to require negative answers. 
On the other hand, I have long experienced the efficiency as an aid 
to instruction of the fundamental ideas which the writer referred to 
has vaguely misused in an arraignment of the scientific choice' in this 
regard. 
[^ 9 ] 
