Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/146

 turned out. We have seen how he was the first to recognize the work of Adams; it is not wonderful then that he retained his great popularity to the last.

Herschel and his mathematical friends all advocated strenuously the decimalisation of the coinage; that is, to retain the pound as the standard fundamental unit of financial value, and to retain or adopt only such sub-units as were decimal parts of it; the florin is the tenth part, and the farthing nearly the 1000th part (very approximate cent). Others advocated the shilling for the fundamental unit (=quarter dollar); the latter were called Little-endians, the former Big-endians. However both Big-endians and Little-endians were downed by the non-progressive element. In 1863 a bill was introduced into Parliament to legalize the French metrical system. Herschel, while favoring decimalisation, did not approve of changing the fundamental units. He argued that the French meter was not the 10,000,000th part of a quadrant of the Earth's meridian passing through Paris, but simply the metre des Archives; and that its authority was precisely of the same kind as the standard yard preserved in London. He also pointed out that the inch was very nearly the 500,500,000th part of the Earth's polar axis, and argued that the polar axis was a better natural unit than an arbitrarily chosen meridian. These arguments are the source of inspiration of Rankine's song about the Three-foot Rule, sang at the British Association. This is the point of contest at the present day both in America and Great Britain; it is not decimalisation but the choice of the fundamental units. The opposition comes from those who do not understand that the whole system of scientific arithmetical calculation for instance in electrical engineering, depends on the choice of the fundamental units; and that whatever the advantages or disadvantages of the fundamental French units, whole systems of derived units have been established upon them, and adopted by international conferences.

Sir John Herschel died at Collingwood on the 11th of May, 1871, in the 80th year of his age. The greatest tribute, in my opinion, to his character is the fact that amid the animosities