long the decimal-metrical system has been in use
in scientific operations, answered, " As long as
I can remember. I should think that, since the
year eighteen 'thirty-six no chemist ever made
use of weights which were not decimally
divided." Mr. Fairbairn said, " When the decimal
system has once been used in a machine-making
establishment, I never knew an instance of its
being given up. It will ultimately get into all
mechanical operations." The decimal system
is, indeed, in the working out, so simple and
purely mechanical, that it can itself be worked
by a machine. For this reason, there would be,
bv its adoption, a great saving of the labour of
clerks in merchants' offices. "An English
office," says M. Lorsant, a Belgium manufacturer,
"is made up of ready-reckoners and vade
mecums, things utterly unknown abroad."
Clergymen and teachers point out the immense
waste of time to pupils and masters, over the
learning by heart and application of the English
tables of weights and measures. The metrical
system itself is learned perfectly and for ever in
an afternoon, while its application, says Dr.
Farr, superintendent of the statistical depart-
ment of the General Register Office, " would
get rid of all compound rules of arithmetic."
Professor De Morgan, our best mathematical
teacher, says that " the whole time of arithmetical
education, by adopting the decimal system,
might be reduced by one half, or probably
more." An old and experienced English workman,
who had been engaged on railways in
France, Belgium, and Savoy, said that when
abroad " the English workman got the weights
very quickly. All the workmen I ever had
anything to do with, prefer the French system to the
English."

And now, what is the French "metrical"
system? It is simply this. A standard of
measure or metre is adopted from some measurement
that can be ascertained at any time with
mathematical precision. It is called the measure
or the metre, and the metre which happens to be
adopted is the ten millionth of the distance
between the North Pole and the Equator: which
happens to be our English yard lengthened by
about three inches and a third. The original idea
of an English yard being that it is the measure
from the tip of the middle finger to the middle
of the chest when the arm is outstretched sideways
from—Henry the First's arm—it happens
that the French metre is not so much above as
the present English yard is below, that standard
of measure for a well-grown Englishman. A
metre represents, indeed, pretty exactly the
stretch in the arm and chest of a Life-Guardsman.
We may stick to mother English then,
and adopt the French metre simply by revision
of the English yard. Until the use of the old
yard measure was abolished, the naturalised
French metre might be called the new yard.
Very well. This standard of measure which
we could so easily adopt and turn into
English, and of which the use is that it can at any
time be determined naturally, and does not
require the storage of a model instrument in the
Exchequer, that standard of measure which in
French is called a metre, the French system
simply subdivides in tenths by Latin prefixes—
decimetre, a tenth of it, centimetre, a hundredth
of it, millimetre, a thousandth of it—or multiples
by tens, with Greek prefixes — decametre for
ten of them, hectometre for a hundred of them,
kilometre for a thousand of them. The French
like words of that sort. We don't like them,
and we never can be got to use them, while our
mother tongue contains such words as tenth,
hundredth, and thousandth, ten, a hundred, and
a thousand. Having discarded all commercial
measures of length, except the metre or rectified
yard, it is easier for us to say ten yards than to
say a decimetre; and as no other measure of
length is left to be mentioned, the word yard
itself can often be dropped, because in a measure
understood to be of length, one, ten, a tenth, a
hundred, a hundredth, can mean nothing else
but a yard or its multiples. Uniformity of
standard, and the habit of measuring by tens
being thus established between England and the
nations of the Continent, the foreigner will
understand that a yard is a metre, just as easily
as he sees a horse to be a cheval.

In the metrical system of the Continent, the
metre (or new yard), as standard of length,
governs the whole system of estimating size and
weight. A space ten metres square is taken as
the unit of land measure, and called an are.
There is no nearly corresponding English term
of land measure, though ten ares would be
about a rood. English owners of land would
not thank anybody for interfering too much
with old terms of measurement, but are is a
simple word that nobody can quarrel with, in
harmony, too, with good natural English. Ar
was so natural a combination of letters to our
forebears, the Anglo-Saxon, that it signified
sundry different things, among others, pretty
much what we connect with extent of land,
honour, and property. Let us, then, by all
means, in measuring, call the ten squares
(metres or yards) an are, with or without the
final e, and measure land by the ten, hundred,
or thousand ar.

For measuring the solid contents of large
masses, the French system takes the cube of the
metre or yard, and calls it a stére, sale being
then by the stére in tens and hundreds. We
have no English objection to that word, but
of course should say rather ten stére than
decastére.

That sort of measure being too large for
common purposes, the cube of a tenth of a metre,
or new yard, is taken in place of it as the
common unit of capacity. This the French call a
litre. It represents pretty exactly a pint and
three-quarters, rather more than less, or the
measure now commonly submitted at taverns
and elsewhere to the English consumer as a
quart. We have, therefore, only to abolish our
imperial quart, accept the " reputed" quart as
the true one, and, without importing into the
language a word that no tongue could
naturalise, bring the English quart into exact