Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/41



This song indicates the great inconvenience and expense which would for a short time follow the change to the metric system; but it says nothing of the enormous inconvenience and expense which must always accompany the continued use of that muddle of units which prevails in Great Britain, and to a lesser degree in the United States. The want of system in the units obscures and clouds the whole subject of arithmetic; the school boy's time is spent on artificial reductions instead of the real relations existing between quantities. Consider the great convenience of the American decimal system of coinage, compared with the pounds, shillings, pence and farthings still inflicted on commerce in the old country. It was learned men of the three-foot rule type who prevented the decimal reform of the coinage advocated by De Morgan.

"Too old to go to school" is a sentiment worthy of the Chinese, and its prevalence in Great Britain for generations is a cause which at the present moment threatens her industrial supremacy. The argument drawn from the length of the polar axis of the Earth, is said to be due to Sir John Herschel. At one time it was possible to choose the yard and the pound, but that time has been allowed to slip away. The system of electric units, universally adopted, calls for a change to the meter and the kilogram. Had Rankine received any part of his education abroad, he would probably have opposed this insular idea; his