Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 2.djvu/100

. In the spring of 1752, it occurred to him, that this standard might have been borrowed by some of the braziers or coppersmiths, for the purpose of making- legal measures for the, citizens; and having learned that a person of this description, called Urquhart, had joined the rebel forces in 1745, that his furniture and shop utensils had been brought to public sale on his not returning; and that various articles which had not been sold, were thrown into a garret as useless, he obtained permission to inspect them; and to his great satisfaction, discovered, under a mass of lumber, the precious object of his long research. Thus was recovered the only legal standard of weight and measure in Scotland; after it had been offered, in ignorance, for public sale, and thrown aside unsold as trash, and long after it had been considered by its constitutional guardians as irretrievably lost.

The standard Stirling pint jug is made of brass, in the form of a hollow truncated cone, and weighs 14 pounds, 10 ounces, 1 drop, and 18 grains, Scotch troy. The mean diameter of the mouth is 4.17 inches. The mean diameter of the bottom 5.25 inches, and the mean depth 6 inches English. On the front, near the mouth, in alto relievo, is a shield and lion rampant, the arms of Scotland: and near the bottom another shield, and an ape, passant gardant, with the letter S below, supposed to have been intended as the arms of Stirling. The arms at present are a wolf. The ape must have been put on therefore inadvertently by the maker, or the town must have changed its arms at a period subsequent to the time when the standard was ordered to be made. The handle is fixed with two brass nails; the whole is of rude workmanship, and indicates great antiquity.

By an act of the Scottish parliament, Edinburgh had the keeping of the standard ell; Perth the reel; Lanark the pound: Linlithgow the fit-lot, and Stirling the pint jug; an arrangement made by the legislature, in the view of improving the internal commerce of the country, by checking the frauds which the traffickers of a rude age may be supposed to have often attempted, and because the commodities, to which these different standards referred, were known to have been supplied in greater abundance by the districts and towns to whose care they were respectively committed. Hence it may be inferred, that Lanark was then the principal market for wool; Perth for yarn; Edinburgh for cloth; Linlithgow for grain; and Stirling for distilled and fermented liquors. The Stirling jug is mentioned in acts of Parliament as being in the town before the reign of James II. in 1437: and the last mention made of it is in the reign of James VI., in an "Act of Parliament, 19 February, 1618, anent settling the measures and weights of Scotland." No accurate experiments appear to have been afterwards made with it for fixing the legal quantity of these measures and weights, till the following by Mr Bryce in 1762–3; a period of about one hundred and thirty-five years!

Having been permitted, after recovering the Standard jug, to carry it with him to Edinburgh, his first object was to ascertain precisely, by means of it, the number of cubic inches, and parts of a cubic inch, in the true Scotch pint.

For this purpose the mouth of the jug was made exactly horizontal, by applying to it a spirit level; a minute silver wire of the thickness of a hair, with a plummet attached to each end, was laid across the mouth, and water poured gently in, till, with a magnifying glass, it was seen just to touch the wire: the water was then carefully weighed in a balance, the beam of which would turn with a single grain, when 96 ounces were in each scale. After seventeen trials with clear spring and river water, several of which were made in presence of the magistrates of Edinburgh, the content of the jug was found