Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/786

766 all these machines, gauges, dies, screws, and other parts of engines, will be the work of years—will cost millions of dollars.

"The metric system is not a convenient one for common use. Its measures are not of convenient length. The yard, half the stature of a man, is of convenient length to handle, to use, to apply. It, and the goods measured by it, can be halved, quartered, subdivided into eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds, sixty-fourths, etc.; or it can be with equal facility divided into tenths, hundredths, thousandths. Half a metre is no dimension; half a centimetre is an unknown quantity; but half a yard, half a foot, half an inch, half a bushel, one fourth of a bushel, of a quart, of a pint, etc., are recognized. If half a litre, of a decilitre, or a quarter, eighth, or sixteenth of these quantities is provided for, then the metric decimal system is abandoned at once.

"In calculation the metric system applies admirably to money and accounts of money; but even here the Government has been obliged to abandon for the convenience of the people the true, strict, decimal system, and to coin half a dollar, half an eagle, the quarter of a dollar, etc.

"In the use of weights and measures, however, there are not so great advantages in the decimal system. The unit is too large, and the numbers produced and used in the calculations of the engineer are tedious to write and are beyond the limits of ready apprehension.

"The ciphers and figures 0·00000073 convey no idea to a mind trained in the English and American system, and yet such combinations are common in French works of science and mechanics.

"The true scientific natural basis of the metric system has been abandoned. The metre was intended and enacted to be the ten-millionth of the quadrant of the terrestrial meridian of Paris. In the progress of geodesy and science, it is ascertained that the standard metre bears no (exact) relation to that quadrant, and, though it is probably very nearly the ten-millionth of the quadrant of the meridian in which New York lies, it is not probable that it is the ten-millionth of either of the three other quadrants of that meridian, or of any quadrant of any other meridian.

"The fact is, that the metre is quite as arbitrary and unscientific a standard as the foot or yard. It is of less convenient length than either of them, and its compulsory adoption would derange the titles and records of every farm and of every city and village lot in the United States; would put every merchant, farmer, manufacturer, and mechanic to an unnecessary expense and trouble, and all, it seems to me, for the sake of indulging a fancy only, and a baseless fancy, of closet philosophers and mathematicians for a scientific basis of measures and weights which (as the metre is not a ten-millionth of the Paris quadrant, is not what it professes to be and was enacted to be) can not be found in the French metric system.

"1. The unit of length: The metre is 3·280890 $$+$$ feet, or 39·37079 $$+$$ inches.