Page:British Weights and Measures - Superior to the Metric, by James W. Evans.djvu/20

14 Sir F. Bramwell, Bart, F.R.S., the famous engineer, speaking of his experience in Egypt, in the service of the Khedive, where he worked alongside French engineers, said he "was struck with the want of facility with which their calculations were done."

Turning to quite another ﬁeld of operations, we hear much about the convenience of the metric system in scientiﬁc calculations. That this system is largely, almost exclusively, used by scientists must be admitted. Some, it is true, simply follow in the footsteps of others; some, merely to give a tone of science to their books. It has also been pointed out that until within the last forty years or so the bulk of the scientiﬁc teaching was done on the continent, that many of the best professors got their knowledge there, and that they were brought up in the metric system, and have kept to it. Now, a distinguished chemist, Dr. Hurter, chief of the United Alkali Company's immense laboratories, familiar with both methods, and at that very moment using the metric system against his inclinations, wrote, that for analytical purposes—“I have no hesitation whatever in saying that there is no beneﬁt in the metric unit of weights and measures; for analytical purposes the grain is in every way a superior unit. . . . In many operations the decimal system is of enormous advantage, but it is