126 
ON  THE  MANUFACTURE  OF  OLEUM  iETHEREUM. 
ounce,  and  £  ounce  a  drachm;  their  proposed  pint  is  41  ounces,  and  their 
gallon  16£  imperial  pints." 
That  there  are  very  serious  inconveniences  attendant  upon  the 
employment  of  equivocal  terms,  or  of  denominations  having 
different  values,  cannot  be  denied.  It  is  one  of  the  penalties  of 
an  erroneous  system,  that  in  the  transition  to  a  better  one,  there 
is  danger  of  confounding  the  "old  style"  with  the  new.  The 
adoption  of  the  reformed  Gregorian  calendar  is  a  notable  illustra- 
tion of  this.  It  would  perhaps  be  much  better  and  safer,  if  re- 
formed standards,  could  always  be  established  with  their  own 
appropriate  and  distinctive  nomenclature  ;  but  all  experience  has 
shown  that  this  is  just  the  part  most  difficult  of  a  popular  estab- 
lishment. The  continued  inconvenience  therefore  of  having  a 
new-style  u  pound"  and  an  old-style  pound  merely  as  the  transi- 
tional confusion  in  leaving  a  bad  system  for  a  good  one,  appears 
to  us  to  be  by  no  means  so  great  as  that  we  are  now  enduring  in 
the  actual  co-existence  of  two  incongruous  "pounds." 
Mr.  Proctor  concludes  his  interesting  report  with  the  sugges- 
tion that  an  octonary  scale  of  weights  and  measures  would  be 
very  simple  even  in  the  presence  of  a  decimal  arithmetic ;  and 
that  it  would  perhaps  furnish  the  easiest  introduction  to  a 
general  numeration  by  eights. 
"  On  the  adoption  of  the  octavial  weights,  measures,  and  money,  the 
figures  8  and  9  would  fall  into  comparative  disuse  ;  the  former  being  ex- 
pressed as  11  1  "  of  the  higher  order,  thus,  1  0  ;  and  the  latter  as  one  of 
the  higher  order  phis  one,  thus,  1  1 ;  this  would  be  the  first  step  towards 
octavial  numeration,  if  it  was  found  desirable." 
T. 
PRACTICAL  OBSERVATIONS  ON  THE  MANUFACTURE  OF 
OLEUM  iETHEREUM. 
By  C.  Lewis  Diehl,  Je. 
During  the  manufacture  of  Oleum  JEihereum,  the  operator 
frequently  meets  with  difficulties  which  are  in  a  great  measure 
inexplicable.  With  a  view  to  alleviating  these  to  some  extent^ 
the  writer  offers  this  paper  as  the  result  of  his  experience,  and 
hopes  that  it  may  lead  to  further  investigation  by  more  expe- 
rienced operators. 
