114 Agricultural Weights and Measures. 
Length, 2 ft. 9 in. 
Width, 1 „ 8 „ 
Depth, 2 „ 4 „ 
This does not strike ns as extremely commodious. How 
many quarters could be stored in a barn 40 ft. by 20 ft. and 
20 ft. high ? It does not seem to work itself out at a glance. 
Measures have not been defended in recent Acts. Those of 
1824 and 1882 are based on weight as the unit. 
The history of the quarter as the legal unit is interesting. 
It is referred to as the quantity by which wheat is to be priced 
in the following statutes : — 
1155 (?). Henry II. ’s Assize of Bread ; 1 
1463. Act 3 Edward IV., c. 2 ; 
and in so many statutes since 1463 that it may fairly be called 
the national wheat unit since then. It is frequently given 
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as the ordinary 
wheat standard, so that there is continuity of record right back 
to the days of Henry II. Yet nobody, as we have seen, seems 
to know of what it is the quarter. Is there any possibility of 
its original meaning having been merely a measure of grain ? 
The Aryan root GAR, to grind, is found in quern and other 
words connected with grain, including, of course, grain itself 
and garner. , The termination -ter is perhaps the most common 
of all the Aryan formulae for converting a verb into a sub- 
stantive. 
Now it will undoubtedly be difficult to abolish the bushel and 
the quarter ; but there is happily a weight which is of universal 
acceptance, the establishment of which as the legal compulsory 
weight, without whose indication a contract would not be 
legally enforcible, would excite no opposition, but would be 
accepted as in the natural order of things. Without this lever 
one feels that nothing could very well be done, and for want 
of some such lever probably the old peoples failed. “ Give 
me a lever,” said Archimedes, “ and I will move the world.” 
This lever is the pound. The present writer would respect- 
fully urge upon the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries the 
publication of all its returns in pounds as a preliminary, and 
afterwards the promotion of a Bill in Parliament requiring 
all sales of agricultural produce to indicate the quantity in 
pounds as a condition precedent to their legal enforcement. 
There is a difficulty, and one only, to this policy. It is 
that the pound being a small unit for wholesale transactions, 
very large figures would have to be remembered. Most of 
us can remember that an average wheat crop in the United 
Kingdom nowadays is about 7,000,000 quarters, but how 
many, it is asked, would remember that such average crop was 
1 English Industry , by W. Cunningham. University Press, Cambridge, 1896. 
