Edward Nicholson

“ I offer it with all its shortcomings as an attempt to show the metric instincts of man everywhere and in all time, to trace the origins and evolution of the main national systems, to explain the apparently arbitrary changes which have affected them, to show how the ancient system used by the English-speaking peoples of the world has been able, not only to survive dangerous perturbations in the past, but also to resist the modern revolutionary system which has destroyed so many others less homogeneous, less capable of adaptation to circumstances. ”

“ Why the propaganda of the metric system should have had any success in England appears a mystery—yet it is intelligible to anyone who has observed the contagion of opinions, even the wildest. England has been fascinated by its presentation as scientific and international. This is a scientific age, and every new thing that can be puffed as ‘scientific’ is likely to take with people unprepared to criticise the science. I have seen the council of no mean English city induced by the word ‘scientific’ to vote in favour of a petition to make the use of the metric system compulsory ”

“ A century of official pressure, of state-education, and of police proceedings against any public selling, marking or crying of goods otherwise than in metric measures and coins, cannot be without some effect, especially in large towns, but even there, while accounts are kept and bills made according to the legal system, the people, as distinguished from the official classes, have never taken to it, and in the country it is nearly entirely ignored, out of official transactions, both in weight and measures and in money. ”

“ Let now some cubical vessel be constructed to hold exactly the standard measure of water; the length or breadth of each side will give a linear unit which, if it approximate sufficiently with a foot or span to which the people are accustomed, will offer a fixed linear standard in harmony with the other standards. Thus, from a convenient foreign unit of capacity or of weight, a new and complete system of national measures may be constructed by involution. ”

“ The most curious man alive with the exactest scale that the most skilful artisan can invent, shall never be able, out of the standard of one grain, to produce a weight equal to the weight of ten thousand grains. ”

“ The eminent scientists who designed that system were able to solve the most difficult problems in higher mathematics, but failed to comprehend what system of weights and measures was best suited for the carder, spinner, weaver and finisher of wool, cotton, linen and silk. The glamor of their fame failed to make the centimetre suitable for counting ‘picks.’ Their system had to stand or fall on its merits, and falling has proved that the highest of mathematical abilities is not inconsistent with a dense ignorance of the practical affairs of every-day life. ”

“ If to the inconvenience of not being able to halve a unit more than once (and that only as a concession to unscientific weakness of mind) , so that there is an interval of ten units between each named unit of the series, be added that the familiar units of common life, the thumb-breadth, the span, the foot, the pound, the pint, have no representatives in a decimal system, then no cajolery of science or patriotism will persuade men and women to use the system, except under police compulsion, and every trick will be used to evade it. Such are the ways of the human mind. ”

“ MEASURES OF VALUE 1. English Money In all times money has been the weight of a certain amount of copper, silver or gold, in the form of coins the fineness of which is guaranteed by the stamp of the State. The weight of coins used in payments may change in course of time, but the nominal unit of weights often continues, the pound, or livre, or marc, &c. Thus, the original Roman unit, the As, or mint-pound of copper or bronze, reduced gradually to 1/24 of its primitive weight, persisted as a money of account long after it had been replaced in the currency by the silver Denarius. ”

“ We reject an artificial system founded in hatred of the past, and only kept up in its native country by police-force. In the name of decimals you want us to abolish our pound, and use a kilogramme which your own people will not use. It should be enough for you that we have given your system a denizenship by the abuse of which we have been greatly annoyed. ”

“ But age warns me to bring my work to a close, leaving its correction and completion to younger men. Yet I hope I have been able to show the principles of unity and of diversity; and apparent confusion becomes clear when the keys of metrology are at hand. The trend of the human mind is always the same; for weights and measures are a part of the daily life of every man and woman. ”

“ Such are the arguments used in the propaganda of a system which would make much of the past life of our country unintelligible, send most of its manufacturing machinery to the scrap-heap, dislocate trade for years and bring about in our country the same struggle that is still to be seen in France between the law and the people. ”

“ After this disastrous surrender to international science, the governments of other countries, large and small, civilised and semi-barbarous, were easily induced by skilful diplomacy to impose the French republican measures on their peoples, heedless of the fact that all the persuasion and pressure of the French government had failed to get its own people to use the system whenever it could be evaded. ”

“ Among the small number of real republicans who ruled France from Paris, there was much less enthusiasm for the metric system, intended to sweep away the memory of the old customs of weights and measures, than for the calendar, the essential part of which was a new era and the sweeping away of past superstitions, whether Pagan or Christian. ”

“ Market-prices of agricultural produce are frequently stated by newspapers in the old measures; that of apples is constantly recorded by the barattée, literally the churnful, about equal to our bushel.
The old agrarian measures are used quite close to Paris. I ask a farmer, not six miles from Paris, how much land he has, and he, knowing me to be ‘safe,’ says so many estrées. How much is an estrée? 1600 square toises is his answer. ”

“ SYSTEMS Two systems are face to face throughout the West—the Imperial system resting on long custom and on convenience, and the Metric system on an assumption of science and on revolt against the past. It has been shown that the system which pretends to be the only scientific one, and the easiest, is a failure even in France ”

“ Although the English-speaking peoples have a 305system with which they are satisfied, unfortunately few know its principles; and, in weights and measures as in other matters, an inferior article well advertised supplants an old-established and satisfactory article that is not advertised. If the French people have not revolted long ago against the system imposed on them by the Paris bureaucracy, it is because it is thoroughly advertised as scientific, international, and as conquering the world by the superior civilisation of the French nation. ”

“ General Remarks In the various names of weights and measures there are many general-utility words which offer no difficulty in the sphere of those who use them habitually, yet which are sometimes puzzling to others, while they are interesting to the student of semantics. They form a chapter in the history of weights and measures, itself a volume in the history of the human mind. ”

“ Many foreign measures are either a cubic foot, sometimes increased in water-wheat ratio, or a cubed cubit.
In Germany, amid a great diversity of measures, a chaos to anyone who has not the key to the principle of unity underlying variety, apparently aberrant measures often show by their names that, while their value has changed, they were originally of a standard that can be traced. And it will generally be found that they are related to a cubic foot, perhaps increased in water-wheat ratio. ”

“ One thing is certain, that a wise government sanctions the measures which fit its people; its business is to maintain unity in the inevitable variety; and it should distrust the pretensions of science to dictate to men and women, to trade and manufacturers, the measures they shall use. Whether in theocratic ancient Egypt or in revolutionary modern Europe, science is a good servant of Humanity, but a bad master.
58. The system of the United States only differs from the Imperial system in its retention of the wine-gallon = 231 c.i. and of the corn-gallon = 268·8 c.i. ”

“ Evolution of Geometric Land-measures While smaller units, such as the superficial rod, can easily be conceived as square, the larger arable units have, or have had, a peculiar form which still attaches to them. The peasant, whose mind’s eye 67can perceive the square rod or toise or verge, refers the rood or the acre, the vergée or the arpent, to the familiar length of the furrow and to the breadth of the rod or of the four-rod acre-breadth equal to a cricket-pitch. ”

“ In England a few genuine enthusiasts, and many more who have caught the scientific and cosmopolitan craze, take to the metric system as they take to learning Esperanto, and so long as they have not to use the one in business or the other in conversation, their enthusiasm lasts, especially when it affords opportunities for showing themselves friends of science and progress. ”

“ The necessary state-privilege of coining money sometimes led to differences between mint-weight and commercial weight. Just as there arose in the ancient East a royal or sacred cubit different from that in vulgar use, so there arose in many countries a royal pound used in the mint and different from the vulgar commercial weight. In many countries, ancient and modern, the mint has kept up systems of weight consecrated by tradition but obsolete for all other uses, and out of harmony with commercial weight. ”

“ An Apothecaries’ Troy ounce lingers in the Board of Trade list of standards, for a permissive use utterly unrequired by medical prescribers or by druggists; the British Pharmacopœia only recognising Imperial weight, the ounce and the grain. For convenience, a 105weight of 60 grains is called a Drachm, and one of 20 grains is called a Scruple. It is most rare for prescriptions to contain an ounce of any solid medicine; and when an ounce of such a medicine is most exceptionally prescribed, it might be an Imperial ounce, just as ounces of fluid medicines prescribed are Imperial ounces. ”

“ Greek Itinerary Measures Though a length of 10 stadia is a meridian mile, neither the Egyptians nor the Greeks appear to have used this mile as an itinerary measure. Herodotus says:
All men who are short of land measure it by Fathoms; but those who are less short of it, by Stadia; and those who have much, by Parasangs; and such as have a very great extent, by Schoinoi. Now a Parasang is equal to 30 stadia, and each Schoinos, which is an Egyptian measure, is equal to 60 stadia. ”

“ A 9subdivision of the talent would become the pound or common unit of weight in the retail market, and a subdivision of the pound would be fixed as the weight of silver which, impressed with signs guaranteeing its fineness, if not its actual weight, would be the currency of the merchants.
Then arose, by involution, another system of weights in which the pound was usually of 12 or 16 ounces, and the ounce was the weight of so many standard coins. Every modern pound was based on this system. ”

“ LAND-MEASURES 1. Introduction The first measures of land were seed-measures. They are found in every country; they become fixed in course of time as the idea of geometric measurement arises; they survive in name giving the peasant a concrete idea of the extent of his fields. ”

“ It is not for us then to criticise severely the pious desire of a learned priesthood or of a theocratic king to institute a sacred standard of linear measure with divisions corresponding in number to the seven planets which 20ruled the destinies of man, whose influence ruled them through the Christian middle ages, which at the present day still rule the world in the minds of the great majority of mankind. The royal or sacred cubit became the official cubit of the Eastern great kingdoms, the common or meridian cubit being also used, not only for ordinary purposes, but sometimes along with it. ”

“ The trader has to evade the law if he wishes to retain his customers. The manufacturer, not keeping an open shop, finds evasion easier, and all the circulars addressed by the government to Chambers of Commerce begging them to support the metric system remain without effect. A few months ago a circular deplored the practice of selling and buying silkworms’ eggs by the ounce. Recently a circular forbade professors and schoolmasters to utter the names of the old weights, measures or coins, or to allow their pupils to utter them. ”

“ The favour which the metric system has found amongst a small proportion of English people is largely due to their ignorance of their own system, an ignorance very excusable when there exists no official statement of our system, or even of its standards. ”

“ As the vergée in France (sometimes ambiguously called verge, as it has been seen that Recorde spoke of ‘a rodde of lande which some call a roode’) and the rood in England were a quarter-acre, and as this quarter-acre was sometimes called a ‘yard of land,’ so virga-verge-yard acquired the general sense of ‘quarter’—either of an 81acre or of a ploughland or carucate. Thus in ‘Quant une homme est feffe dune verge de terre et dun autre de un carue du terre’ (Statute of Wards, 1300) , the term ‘verge de terre’ means not a rod, a verge, but a yardland or virgate. ”