Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/408

404 factory to most of those who use it. Change in our system of metrology is not needed for political unification. Any legal enactment imposing a sudden change will be apt to arouse enough popular opposition to ensure its repeal before the people have had a fair chance to give an impartial test to the new system. A probation period of ten years in the government departments might perhaps be better than one year; or possibly it might be wiser at present to avoid specifying the length of any probation period. It would be better for the demand to come from the people at the end of thirty years than for a repeal of the law to be forced after it has been in operation only a short time.

Much has been said about the superiority of a binary to a decimal system. It is admitted that the decimal system is better for purposes of computation, but alleged that in the ordinary practical affairs of life people divide into halves and quarters more readily than into tenths. There can be no objection to the simultaneous application of both methods, so far as convenience may suggest. A binary system does not lend itself to decimal notation, while a decimal system does admit of limited, but amply sufficient, binary subdivision. This has been abundantly shown in the use of American money. Half-dollars and quarter-dollars, as divisions, are entirely satisfactory to all advocates of a decimal system. Our fathers coined eighth-dollars and sixteenth-dollars also, but nobody seemed to want them. Half-meters and quarter-meters as linear divisions are quite as good as half-dollars and quarter-dollars. Our idea of a quarter of a dollar is no less definite if it be called twenty-five cents. In like manner, no one can object to calling twenty-five centimeters either a quarter of a meter or a metric foot, agreeing in length with the human foot. That decimal subdivision is quite as natural as binary subdivision is shown by the universal American tendency to express profits and losses as percentages. If there is any real superiority in binary subdivision all dividends should be expressed in thirty-seconds, or sixty-fourths, or hundred-and-twenty-eighths.

It has been urged that a duodecimal system is better than either a binary or a decimal system. This may be granted, but its introduction would involve practical difficulties much greater than any connected with the general adoption of the metric system, including the abolition of the British system. Its consideration has no more practical importance than a proposition to substitute Volapuk for the English language.

The late Sir Joseph Whitworth expressed the opinion that the adoption of the metric system would be easy if its advocates would only lengthen the meter from 39.37 to 40 inches. This would make the inch rather than the meter our unit of length. Such a change would on many accounts be exceedingly desirable. But its consideration could be only the result of compromise in an international conference