CHAPTER XI.

BRITISH METROLOGY;

Its High Descent and Pyramidal Bearings.

Not only has it appeared, we trust, from the previous chapters taken in the whole, that some standards of measure and weight are instruments of instant research and discovery in the Great Pyramid,—but that the best units and standards for the purpose have very remarkably close approaches to certain units and examples of the British system of Metrology. More especially as that system was known in earlier historic ages than our own.

The Very Reverend Bishop Cumberland, D.D., in 1686,¹ devoting himself for a time to the topic of weights and measures of many nations, is strong upon both its antiquity, usefulness and learning. "Learning," says he, "I call this knowledge, because the first constitution of weights and measures, and the reasons and proportions contained in their mutual correspondences, do impart, not only prudent observation, which is 228learning's foundation, but also some elements of geometry and staticks (which are essential parts of its superstructure) and certain mathematical notions which are as old almost as mankind. But,” he complains, “such hath been the ignorance and carelessness in these matters, of many intervenient ages, by whose care these things should have been transmitted to us their posterity, that many diligent enquirers, quite despairing, have been of late almost inclined to cast the whole subject into its already prepared grave of oblivion and neglect.”

These views of the worthy Bishop of Peterborough, two centuries ago, contain most salutary truth for our own times also; and if we would fully understand the weights and measures of our own land, we must begin, at least, with Magna Charta date. For those Metrological Institutions had existed from still earlier times, even the very earliest times known to our literature, an heirloom among the Anglo-Saxon peoples; and a late first-rate American writer, as well as statesman (John Quincey Adams), equally claiming with ourselves to be descended from that ancient Anglo-Saxon stock, but without any necessary prejudice in favour of the wisdom of modern British Parliaments, has expressed a very firm conviction that the most perfect condition of those weights and measures, even including all that was done for them by modern savants under the reign of George IV., was, in the earliest known times of Saxon history. Also that such perfection of British metrology connects itself much more with an ancient Royal residence at Winchester, than a modern one in London or Windsor. It may have been earlier still. At all events, the old, long-employed, ancestor-descended system had already fallen into such republican, many-headed confusion in the times of King John, that his then new Charter, to the joy of all men, said that in future there was only 229to be one standard of measure throughout the land;² while, to render that principle a possible one to carry out in practice, wisdom counselled, and ancient Saxon practice reminded, that grand standards both of length and weight should be immediately constructed, and copies thereof dispatched to all parts of the kingdom.

But what followed?

Those standard measures, if ever made, were lost; no copies were sent to country districts; the Magna Charta lawyers trusted in words only;³ and then came a certain very natural consequence.

Practical weights and measures are not only of interest, but essential importance to all classes of the realm: for, as was well said years ago, all the productions of land and labour, of nature and art, and of every concern and condition of life, are bought, sold, or estimated by them. Hence, weights and measures have been very properly defined as the foundation of justice, the safeguard of property, and the rule of right; while the laws of honour peculiarly abhor any fraud in this respect. Yet withal, says the same authority, it is to the common people, in every country, to whom the 230business of weighing and measuring is almost exclusively committed. Whence, in part, by evident necessity it comes, that weights and measures are primarily affairs of the practically labouring classes of the poor, and those who with their own hands do the daily work of the world.

Their weights and measures too, to be fully useful, must suit the working-men, just as naturally as the mother-tongue is felt to do in after-life; for who is there, unless experienced in practical matters himself, who knows how suddenly and immediately in many of the constant affairs of the working world, an unexpected exigency occurs; when, without books, or scales, or balances, or compasses, the labouring man, whether sailor or coal-miner, whether agriculturist or engineer, has to look some natural danger in the face; and his only hope of plucking the flower, “safety,” from the event, is in his then and there instantly concluding, without instrumental assistance, without time for serious thought or metrical examination, upon a nearly correct estimate of some measure of weight, or length of space, or strength of material, or angle of slope, before the catastrophe arrives?

So what was the consequence when the restored king and government of A.D. 1215, having got the rule of the country once again into their power, did not send the promised standards to every town and village in the land? Why every town and every village began in self-defence to make standard measures for themselves in their often very isolated provincial communities.

History of British Weights and Measures from Magna Charta times to the Georgian Era.

Within a certain range, that was tolerable enough; because all those earlier examples pro tem. were more 231or less closely founded on, or were tolerably representative in some way or another of, the original Saxon standards; and were named with short, pithy names derived from the same effective language. But after that first beginning of going a little astray, then as civilization progressed, wealth asserted its interests too powerfully. Whence the tendency arose to substitute legal deeds, in place of material examples; and lawyers were always attainable, to frame any number of acts of parliament to secure rent and taxes being drawn from the working poor in any and every denomination; but to prevent their deriving profits from their work, unless a statute standard was rigidly adhered to by them.

Unfortunately, however, the powers that were, went on framing their acts of parliament without either defining, actually making, or in fact identifying any such standard. The taking of practical scientific steps really to do that, seemed to men of over-refined education in both classic literature and high mental philosophy, a base mechanic operation, which their ethereal line of studies placed them far above the level of. It was a drudgery they would not submit to; and even up to the other day (1814), when at last it was impressed on the governing bodies, that, in the material matter of weights and measures, there must be material standards,—they grandiloquently appointed a yard, which was to bear a certain proportion to a second's pendulum of a specially named and legally described scientific order,—but what length that pendulum was of, in very fact, they did not know and did not inquire; for they said "any expert watchmaker could ascertain that"; and yet up to the present time neither watchmaker nor philosopher, nor government official of any kind or degree, has fully succeeded in that little, but found at last to be a transcendentally difficult, problem.

So the confusion of weights and measures only grew 232worse in the kingdom, and the fault was attributed to the wrong parties, or the working men; as when a Parliamentary Committee reported in 1758, that of those uneducated beings, but who had hitherto borne all the toil and burden of the work, “only a few of them were able heretofore to make proper measures or weights; standards were carelessly made by them and destroyed as defective, and the unskilfulness of the artificers, joined to the ignorance of those who were to size and check the weights and measures, occasioned all sorts of varieties to be dispersed through the kingdom, which were all deemed legal, yet disagreed.”

Other independent-minded persons, however, ventured to counter-report, and perhaps more justly, that another cause of this confusion was “the prodigious number of acts of parliament, whereby the knowledge of weights and measures became every year more and more mysterious.” In 1823 it was stated by Dr. Kelly, in his examination before the House of Lords, “that there had been upwards of two hundred laws enacted without success in favour of conformity, and five hundred various measures in defiance of those laws.” Both sets of acts of parliament, too, were in opposition to that law of the practical nature of things, which ordains that everything in connection with weights and measures shall be done in direct reference to material examples thereof.

The Georgian and William the Fourth Eras.

But, in 1824, a standard yard and a standard pound were at last deposited in the House of Commons; and the Legislature enjoyed the advantage of having a moderately accurate example before them, of the practical thing they were legislating about. This pleasure, however, only lasted about ten years; for in October, 2331834, both yard and pound perished in the Great Fire which consumed the two Houses of Parliament.

Then was made another lamentable attempt to get on without any standards at all; to collect revenue by the threat of a standard, and yet have no standard to refer to. Lawyers, therefore, had it all their own way in this pleasant fiction; and in an act of parliament (5 and 6 William IV. c. 63), which passed both assemblies in the following year, “the standards were referred to as if still in existence, and quoted as authorities to be appealed to on every occasion, although they had been actually destroyed a twelvemonth before, and no other standards submitted in their stead.”

Both Houses of Parliament certainly appeared to have been wholly ignorant of this actual non-existence of the objects on which they were legislating; and Government itself was not aware of the state of ruin and neglect into which certain other standards, more hereditary than legal, had fallen into, in their own Exchequer Office.

In 1742, when some inquiries were set on foot by both the Royal Society of London and the Paris Academy of Sciences, those Exchequer standards (one of them an ell, and the other a yard, of the time of Queen Elizabeth), were then in a respectable condition, and seemed to be treated with attention and care, by the high officers and clerks of the establishment. But no one had heard of them again for a long interval. And when their habitation was at length revisited in 1835, to see the only real foundation on which the government of good King William was then legislating, Mr. Baily reports of the then single standard shown to him, the Elizabethan yard,⁴ “that it was impossible to speak of it too much 234in derision and contempt. A common kitchen poker, filed at the end in the rudest manner by the most bungling workman, would make as good a standard. It has been broken asunder,” he writes, “and the two pieces have been dovetailed together, but so badly that the joint is nearly as loose as a pair of tongs. The date of the fracture I could not ascertain, it having occurred beyond the memory or knowledge of any of the officers at the Exchequer. And yet, till within the last ten years, to the disgrace of this country, copies of this measure have been circulated all over Europe and America, with a parchment document accompanying them (charged with a stamp that costs £3 10s., exclusive of official fees), certifying that they are true copies of the British standard.”

These are severe remarks; and yet partly help to answer the noted difficulty which Dr. Kelly found himself confronted with, after all his historical researches up to his own time; viz. that in England there is nothing that has a greater tendency to grow worse, or, curiously enough, more obstinately resists improvement, than weights and measures. Yet the Exchequer itself has indicated the full truth of Mr. Baily’s critique, by publishing the Astronomer-Royal’s very similar views; first, on the error in the general theory of British legislation on the subject of standards as shown in “the entire apathy on the part of Government towards the matter, whereby it acts only when pressed by popular demands”; and second, the error in the practice of the 235British Executive, which is, within its functions, not much unlike the above.

Since then, however, some members of Her Majesty's Government have advanced in metrological knowledge: a new office has been created for weights and measures, furnished with princely apartments, numerous assistants, a large revenue, and placed under a chief, with the title of "Warden of the Standards." Hence too, a gentle current of interest has so decidedly begun to flow towards the subject, that one or two of the oratorical leaders in politics have encouragingly intimated, that when that current shall have become decidedly stronger, they may then find it worth their while to utilise its motive power for their own purposes; and perhaps at the same time consider what can be done for, or with, our British hereditary weights and measures.

The outbreak of Modern Agitators and misplaced love for the French Mètre.

Too late! too late! for while those politicals were selfishly dallying with their national duties, a mine has been sprung beneath their feet. The merchants and manufacturers of the country, with a section of the scientific men, chiefly of the electrician and chemical stamp, have burst into the arena, and declared that they cannot wait for the slow improvements of Government. The creed that they almost worship consists in "buying in the cheapest, selling in the dearest, market," and making money with the utmost speed!⁶ and as they fancy that the further and indefinite extension of their operations receives a momentary check in some foreign countries, by the different metrological systems there and here,—so immediately, without allowing the 236mass of the population to have a voice in that which is their affair, which is as ancient and necessary to them, the people, as their very language and all their other national and hereditary institutions; and without considering whether, by breaking down the barriers between France with Frenchified countries and ourselves, they may not be raising up other obstacles between ourselves as so altered, and Russia, America, and Australia,—they, these new intruders into the metrological scene, are interestedly calling out and loudly demanding that French weights and French measures shall be instantly adopted by force of law and police from one end of Great Britain to the other. Under pains and penalties, too, of the most compulsory order; and to be enforced at all risks of national resistance by a new and special description of highly paid officials to be appointed for that sole purpose.

In the midst of such a headlong pursuit of mere wealth,—as this unprecedented throwing overboard of the pre-historic possessions of our nation, for such a purpose, would be,—the poor are unfortunately the first to go to the wall. They may have been somewhat curbed and bridled in past times by kings and barons and government servants,—but what is that to the oppression of merchants and mill-masters, of the present generation only, hasting to be rich; and freely sacrificing thereto any patriotic sentiments or historical associations which their mere “hands” may presume to indulge in?

The Committee were indeed told, from the reports of the Astronomer-Royal at Greenwich, and elsewhere, “that the said forcible introduction of foreign weights and measures into Great Britain would be to the excessively great inconvenience of 9,999 persons out of every 10,000 of the population, and the gain to the one person in 10,000 only small; and that any interference of Government for compelling the use of foreign measures in the 237ordinary retail business of the country would be intolerable; that they could not enforce their penal laws in one instance in a thousand, and in that one it would be insupportably oppressive." Yet all the effect that this wise, and truly charitable information produced on the merchants of peace professions but money-making practice was, in the very words of Mr. Cobden, the teacher of Free-Trade, "to look forward to a comprehensive and exact system of inspection, and the establishment of an efficient (i.e. a tyrannous) central department to give force and unity to local action." In fact, for a few Englishmen to act in Great Britain, like a German, or even a Russian, army in undisputed possession of a foreign country; and put down at all costs, amongst the British people, any national feelings for certain historical institutions of their own. Or for things which, however they may have been meddled with in petty ways by modern acts of parliament, are still substantially the same as those which the origenes of the nation received, no one now knows exactly how, or where, or precisely when; though every one is aware that we have possessed them for as long as we have been a nation at all; and the mass of our working-people understands the outside, physical world familiarly, intuitively, only in terms of them; viz. of their ancient, hereditary weights and measures.

The late near domination of Great Britain by the French Mètre.

Thus far, nearly, was written in the first edition of this book, published in 1864; but now, in 1877, what is the state of matters?'

Well, their condition is surely most passing strange; for, bill after bill has been brought into Parliament, 238agitators have been at work throughout the land; and men who a few years ago gave the most splendid testimony that to force foreign measures on the British people would aggravate them to the extent of civil war, —have now been signing propositions on the other side; and even assisting in putting up at the Palace of Westminster, side by side, copies of the British and French standards of length, as though the Government of France ruled already over half of the British people; —and still the change of weights and measures has not really taken place yet.

Other renegades, encouraged too by some of the chief scientific societies in London, have been publishing new text-books in science for, if possible, all the rising generation of the empire; in which books, though the authors still condescend to use the English language, they scorn to be loyal to British authorised weights and measures; but speak of everything in the wide heavens above and broad earth below in the imported French metrical terms; which they seem to have sworn together they will make the people of this country accept, whether they like them or not.⁷ While in the elementary schools which are now springing up under Government School Board management all over the country, teachers are urged from some secret quarter to take time, with its expected political changes, by anticipation, and teach all the children within their reach at once the French weights and measures; or when they cannot do that, to have some printed representation of the French system suspended in sight, as though it were soon going 239to be the law of the land;—but yet the change has not been allowed.

More threatening still were the proceedings of the late Gladstonian Government; for if they did advise Mr. Benjamin Smith to withdraw his Parliamentary pro-French-Metric Bill in 1873, it was under the promise that they would bring in a Bill themselves in 1874-5. They had already, under the headship of the Duke of Argyll in the India Office, introduced the Anti-British metrical system into India, in the most sweeping fashion of thorough-going, red, revolutionists, by arbitrary and unprecedented enactments;⁸ and now, apparently they contemplated doing the same thing for the British

Writing now, in 1877, I am told that this system is not yet fully in force, that it never can be enforced without, at least, a frightfully overpowering increase of our army and police; and that, in so far, it has only added another element to the difficulties existing in India before.

What the expense has been on the part of Government, and the complaints of the 300 millions of the Indian people in their own homes at the heartless experiment of a few doctrinaires in London being tried off upon them,—referring them, in the tropics, to the temperature of melting ice, and at the sea-level base of the whole atmosphere to a vacuum, for testing their new and alien standards,—it would be instructive indeed to ascertain; but will it ever be given out? 240people themselves. But to have extra power wherewith high-handedly to force French weights and measures down the throats of a free British people, Mr. Gladstone not only appointed himself Chancellor of the Exchequer as well as Prime Minister, but must needs also go to the country for a greater Parliamentary majority than that he already had. He went; and now we all know how he fell, his opponents came into power instead; and are there still in 1879 A.D.

Breadth of the Principles really concerned in the establishment of a nation's Weights and Measures.

This culminating case almost opens up a possible view of whence came the controlling influence which caused all the former bills before Parliament to fail. They were broken without hand; and no one at the time saw why. Certainly they were not defeated by any visibly sufficient efforts of men. For though two good speeches were delivered against the last bill, what were they to the torrent of now fiery, now persuasive, now flattering declamation on the other side,—claiming, too, to be the side of liberal opinion, of modern science, of political advance, of mercantile wealth, of organized industries, of all civilization, and indeed of everything but—nationality, history, and religion.

Those three ought, of course, to be a powerful trio; but the two latter of them were not invoked in Parliament at all. Indeed they were apparently not understood by either party as belonging to the subject, though they inevitably must be allowed their due place in its discussion before long; so that whatever political ferment has been made hitherto by the metrological question, it is nothing to what will come.

241Just now, or up to the present time, the fight has merely been between the would-be introducers of the new French metric system and the defenders of the British national system as it is. These latter men will have no change, simply because they dislike all change; and have been getting on after a fashion, they think, well enough hitherto. But they cannot expect on those principles to have the victory in future fights always given into their hand: especially when they can neither pretend to prove that the existing British metrology is everything that it might be to suit the advanced wants of the present high state of civilisation; nor demonstrate that it is still, all that it once historically was, in that primeval time when the system was first given as an heirloom to the Anglo-Saxon race, before they came to these islands; and where were they then?

When writers of the Georgian era are found complaining that through all our modern history, our weights and measures had always been growing worse, rather than better,—strange that none of them should have risen to the necessarily resulting idea that at some primeval age, they must have been of strange and even surpassing excellence. And yet such appears to have been the actual fact. Nor is it any detraction from much of the intrinsic merits of those early weights and measures to have it now suggested, that they were adapted to one nation only, and were in use by the common people there; whereas the present highly educated class desires a cosmopolitan set of weights and measures for its own ultra-refined use, no matter what their foreign nomenclature, and anti-British origin; for the whole of this idea is, in principle, a mere resuscitation of a cruel fallacy of the Middle Ages; viz. to try to keep up Latin as a common language among all scientists, whatever language their poor fellow-countrymen might speak. A suicidal fallacy too; because it was found in 242practice infinitely more important, patriotic and charitable, as well as successful in science also, for each scientific man to have no secrets, no mysteries from the masses of those poor, but often most religiously minded men around him; his own countrymen; and whose friendly encompassing of him in that manner, was the very source of the quiet and leisure and command of means which he enjoyed for the prosecution of his peculiar studies. Wherefore the first professor who gave a scientific lecture in the vulgar tongue in a German university, was rightly held to have made almost as precious, useful, and fruitful a reform there, as that truly Christian priest who began the system of publicly praying, and reading the Scriptures, in the language of the people.

There is, indeed, something to be said for a little final regulation of the details of weights and measures coming from the side of science. But, as for the mass of the question, the people were in the field before science. Neither is it in the power of any scientific men, with all their science up to its very latest developments, to invent a truly national set of weights and measures, any more than they can make a national language and a national people.

The beginning of the Religious Element in Weights and Measures origination.

Before the Flood, according to the Bible, there was no division of mankind into nations; that was a Divine appointment afterwards, together with the creation of their tongues, the appointment of their bounds, and, there are good reasons for believing, the assignment of their weights and measures. And if that was the case, a direct and intentional effort by men to subvert them now entirely, is not likely to succeed, however 243many scientists and scientific societies too, even like the wealthy Royal Society of London, put their shoulders to the wheel.

But the French metrical system, in its acts and ambitions, is precisely such an attempt in these days to dethrone the primeval systems of weights and measures among all nations; and make all mankind speak in future in that new and artificial metrological language, invented only eighty years ago in Paris. So that if there is sound reason for believing in the Divine appointment of the ancient systems,—and also, that one of the engines and methods of the final and chief Antichrist in destroying the salvation of mankind, is to induce them to set up human associations in the latter day in opposition to the revelations of God’s will,⁹—this new antagonistic metrological system ought to have been ushered in under some very evil influence.

How, then, was it brought to the light of day?

By the wildest, most bloodthirsty, and most atheistic revolution of a whole nation, that the world has ever seen. And, attempt to conceal it as they may, our present meek-looking but most designing promoters for introducing that very French system amongst us, cannot wipe out from the page of history, that, simultaneously with the elevation of the metrical system in Paris, the French nation (as represented there), did for themselves formally abolish Christianity, burn the Bible, declare God to be a non-existence, a mere invention of the priests, and institute a worship of humanity, or of themselves; while they also ceased to reckon time by the Christian era, trod on the Sabbath and its week of seven days, and began a new reckoning of time for human history both in years of their then new French Republic, and in decades of days, so as to conform 244in everything to their own devised new metrical system, but with the old Natural decimal division, rather than to revelation.

Mere human telling, in the first edition of this book, was not enough to remind our British metrical agitators of those fearful things: so they have had them, not sounded again only, but repeated too in fact, within the two years following the Franco-German war, in blood and fire and blackest of smoke throughout the same city of Paris,—when the Commune, on getting for a time the upper hand, immediately re-established the Republican era as against the Christian, and declared war against every traditional observance and respect of man.¹⁰ While since then, the still more savage and merciless proceedings of the Spanish Commune, wherever it has had an opportunity of rising in their cities, shows that the heart of man, unregenerated in Christ, is no whit better in the present day than at any epoch throughout all antiquity.

Now, perhaps,—and without pursuing any further this historic part of the subject of weights and measures, which, though as old as Cain and Seth, if not Abel also, is by no means yet played out on the stage of time,—it may be given to a favoured, predestined few, to begin to understand, on a figure once used by Dr. Chalmers, what extensive armaments of what two dread opposing spiritual powers may be engaging in battle around our little isle, contending there—on this subject, too, as well as many others—for mighty issues through all eternity.

So that not for the force of the sparse oratory emitted in defence of British metrology before Parliament, were 245the bills of the pro-French metrical agitators so often overthrown, but for the sins rather of that high-vaulting system itself; and to prevent a chosen nation, a nation preserved through history thus far by much more than the wisdom of its own native rulers, and for more glorious purposes than have ever yet occurred to them,—to prevent that nation unheedingly robing itself in the accursed thing, in the very garment of the coming Antichrist; and Esau-like, for a little base-pottage, for a little temporarily extra mercantile profit, throwing away a birthright institution which our Abrahamic race was intended to keep, until the accomplishment of the mystery of God touching all humankind.

The outcome, and devotion of all that science alone was capable of, in its country's Metrological cause.

A very close approach to the dangerous cliff was made only a dozen years ago, when the Government's own Standards Commission, not content with the yard in place of the inch being pronounced a new British unit, must also propose to drop the original inch entirely; inventing new names for multiples of 1,000 and 2,000 of their new unit yard, to take the place of the British mile; and sub-dividing it again as a concrete quantity into a totally unheard-of set of small lengths, such as neither we nor our fathers ever knew, to supersede and obliterate what have hitherto well served all the smaller, and most of the exact, purposes of Anglo-Saxon life and existence.

But happily the Commissioners' hands were stayed; and one of their number—the highest approach to the ideal of a philosopher since the days of Newton whom this country has produced, the late Sir John Herschel—was presently gifted to see, that of all the various 246lengthmeasures now on the statute-book, the inch (which was then in such imminent danger) is by far the most really important; because, not only was it the true and original unit and source of almost all the others, but he found it to be possessed also of cosmopolitan excellencies fitting it for the use of all the nations of the world. This idea too seemed continually to grow in Sir John Herschel's mind. For, through the inch, and water, he perceived that all the hereditary British weights and measures might be easily made (once again perhaps) most scientifically earth-commensurable; and without the popular value of any of the chief units or standards, or even their names being interfered with.

That grand principle, too, of earth-commensurability, or that there should be a complete and harmonious scale of round, and even, numerical relations connecting the small units employed by man in his petty constructions on the earth, with the grander units laid out by the Creator in the sky, Sir John Herschel stood up splendidly for: and argued and wrote for the glorious idea really belonging, and to have belonged of old, to British metrology; but in vain! His colleagues on the Standards Commission could see no beauty nor desirability in that which he esteemed so highly: unless it was those of them who claimed something of the same earth-commensurable principle, though in a less perfect form, for the newly invented French mètre: and they wished to abolish the entire and ancient British system. So after doing all that he could to convince, demonstrate, persuade, with the effect only of finding that the majority were determined to sacrifice everything British to France, he took the only final course for a great and honest man to take—he gave up what had been an honour to fifty years of his life, his place at the Standards Commission, his prospects of power or influence in government appointments,—and went out from amongst 247them all, alone. Lowered, perhaps, in the eyes of time-servers; but raised in his own conscience, and nobly nerved to carry on the battle single-handed, in the open world outside, against the pro-French metrical mania of the day. That mania, a strange intellectual disease which Sir John Herschel (the equal to whom, not Cambridge herself could show at the greatest of all competitive mathematical examinations) deemed not only anti-national, but, in spite of all that is so frequently said for it, not of the highest order of science either.

This was a case indeed of a scientist who would willingly suffer in place, power, and worldly social dignity, for opinion; and did so:—a man, therefore, in whom a great nation might trust when any dire emergency should arise; and who, when the last pro-French metrical bill was about to be urged before the House, came to the defence of his country's cause with the following letter to the Editor of the Times:—

“SIR,—

“As Mr. Ewart's Bill for the compulsory abolition of our whole system of British weights and measures, and the introduction in its place of the French metrical system, comes on for its second reading on the 13th proximo, I cannot help thinking that a brief statement of the comparative de facto claims of our British units and of the French on abstract scientific grounds may, by its insertion in your pages, tend to disabuse the minds of such, if any, of our legislators who may lie under the impression (I believe a very common one among all classes) that our system is devoid of a natural or rational basis, and as such can advance no à priori claim to maintain its ground.

“‘De facto, then, though not de jure (i.e. by no legal definition existing in the words of an act of parliament, but yet practically verified in our parliamentary standards of length, weight, and capacity as they now exist), our British units refer themselves as well and as naturally to the length of the earth's polar axis as do the French actually existing standards to that of a quadrant of the meridian passing through Paris, and even in some respects better, while the former basis is in itself a preferable one.

“‘To show this I shall assume as our British unit of length the imperial foot; of weight the imperial ounce; and of capacity the imperial half-pint; and shall proceed to state how they stand related to certain prototypes, which I shall call the geometrical ounce, foot, and half-pint; and shall then institute a similar comparison between the French legally authenticated mètre, gramme, and litre in common use with their 248(equally ideal, because nowhere really existing) prototypes supposed to be derived from the Paris meridian quadrant, distinguishing the former as the practical, the latter as the theoretical, French units.

“Conceive the length of the earth’s axis as divided into five hundred million equal parts or geometrical inches.

“Then we will define:—1. A geometrical foot as twelve such geometrical inches; 2, a geometrical half-pint as the exact hundredth part of a geometrical cubic foot; and, 3, a geometrical ounce as the weight of one exact thousandth part of a geometrical cubic foot of distilled water, the weighing being performed, as our imperial system prescribes, in air of 62° Fahr., under a barometric pressure of 30 inches.

“In like manner the theoretical kilogramme and litre of the French are decimally referred to their theoretical mètre on their own peculiar conventions as to the mode of weighing.

“This premised—(1) the imperial foot is to the geometrical in the exact proportion of 999 to 1,000 (nine hundred and ninety-nine to a thousand), a relation numerically so exact that it may be fairly considered as mathematical; and (2) and (3), the imperial half-pint and ounce are, each of them, to its geometrical prototype as 2,600 to 2,601.

“Turn we now to the practical deviations from their theoretical ideals in the case of the French units. Here, again (1), the practical mètre is shorter than its theoretical ideal. The proportion is that of 6,400 to 6,401. The approximation is, indeed, closer, but the point of real importance is the extreme numerical simplicity of the relation in our case, more easily borne in mind, and more readily calculated on in any proposed case. (2) and (3). Any error in the practical value of the mètre entails a triple amount of aliquot error on the practical kilogramme and litre, so that, in the cases of these units, the proportion between their practical and theoretical values is not that of 6,400 to 6,401, but of 2,133 to 2,134. Here, then, the greater degree of approximation is in our favour; and it is to be observed that in our case this triplication of error does not hold good, since, by a happy accident, our standard pound has been fixed, quite independently of our standard yard, and our gallon is defined as 10 lbs. of water.

“I am, Sir, your obedient Servant,

“J. F. W. Herschel.

“Collingwood, April 30, 1869.”

This is very clear so far: but its able author did not go far enough. For while his grand fountain and source of earth-commensurability for the British measures was based, even by him, upon, not the foot, which he ultimately used, but the inch, being an evenly earth-commensurable measure, and by the particular number of five hundred millions of them,—yet he afterwards drops out of view both the inch, the five times of so many parts, and says nothing about his new cubit standard, which he was at that very time proposing for the British nation, and prescribing that it should consist 249of $5 \times 5$ of those inches, in place of the nation's present yard of thirty-six inches. Nor does the exceedingly eminent astronomer, attempt to show that either the earth-commensurability or the terrestrial fiveness of the British inch was anything more than accidental. At all events, he does not explain how, or when, or through what, or by whom, that unit first came about. And though he alludes to English history as far back as any printed acts of parliament may extend, he shows no faith capable of tracing the fortunes of our nation back, and still further back, even up to those dim periods of primeval story where the Bible is the only book worth consulting.

Perhaps it was well, though, that Sir John Herschel stopped where he did: for time is required to enable mankind at large effectually to receive the whole of any very new idea; and had he, the most brilliant representative of modern exact science, gone on further still, and been the propounder of the Great Pyramid Divinely inspired source of the cosmic wisdom so long latent in our ancient measures: and announced that they had been monumentalized by Palestinian Shepherd Kings in the early Siriad land before history began, but yet in the most perfect earth and heaven commensurability, and in a manner never known to the subsequent profane Egyptians;—the sceptical modern world would hardly have consented to believe, but that the excellencies of such a system were Sir John Herschel's own transcendent inventions; and had arisen much more through his brilliant grasp of modern academical science, than by any simple readings in that primeval stone-book of Revelation which still stands on the Jeezeh hill, ever open, though hitherto illegible to all mankind.

But for John Taylor, who never pretended to be a scientific man, to propound the grand idea;—and for the Scottish Astronomer, with scarce pay enough to exist 250upon, and merely a few old, worn-out, instruments, and one new but only half-completed one (though in a so-called Royal Observatory, but of an ancient kingdom treated very lightly now in London Government offices), at his hand both for professional work, and to follow up the Great Pyramid clue—was, and is, quite a different matter. Such plan was, indeed, hardly other, than to let the stones of the Great Pyramid themselves cry out to a heedless generation.

And now they are beginning to appeal to, and notably moving as well, the millions of Anglo-Saxons in the United States of North America; and even more fervidly than those of Great Britain.

Ancient Anglo-Saxon Metrology in America declares for its Pyramidal, as well as Biblical, derivation.

The same almost unexplainable activities of a particular class of revolutionary agitators have of late been troubling the people of the United States, as well as those in England; and trying to induce them, in an unguarded moment, to throw away their, as well as our, birthright of ages, in their hereditary and traditional weights and measures, and to adopt the newly invented measures of France instead. But now, at last, the people there are getting their eyes open to the real nature of the change which it was proposed they should make; and how do they express themselves upon it?

Following a pamphlet recently (August, 1879) published in Cleveland, Ohio, by Mr. Charles Latimer, Chief Engineer of the railway there,—he finds that the people of the United States are not for the change; nor the Government thereof; nor are any reasons for the said change adduced, that will bear the light of day.

“If we look abroad,” says he, “we can see no evidence of decay in our civilization, or prosperity, or 251diminution of our business, because we have not adopted these French measures. Certainly our Centennial exhibited a most wonderful spectacle; and did we notice that the French were in advance of us? Is their flag seen in every port on the face of the globe, because of the superiority of their measures? Is not the Anglo-Saxon world (the United States and Great Britain) in advance to-day? What superiority or advantage can the French point to on account of their system?”

Then seizing happily the religious thread of the matter, Mr. Latimer exclaims, to the Boston Society of Engineers he was then addressing, and who had very nearly been inveigled a few days before into petitioning Congress to make the adoption of French measures compulsory over the whole United States, “Gentlemen,” he exclaimed, “you may rely upon it that these pilgrim ancestors of yours are not resting easily in their graves on account of your action. They were sticklers for Magna Charta; they loved just weights and measures; and the words of John Quincey Adams, delivered in 1817, are just the words they would give you now. I beg you not to make the mistake of taking the advice of the young men (like those who surrounded Rehoboam), and ignoring the counsel of your fathers. Think for a moment. This French system came out of the ‘Bottomless Pit.’ At that time and in the place whence this system sprang, it was hell on earth. The people defied the God who made them; they worshipped the Goddess of Reason. In their mad fanaticism they brought forth monsters—unclean things. Can you, the children of the Pilgrim Fathers, consent to worship at such a shrine, and force upon your brethren the untimely monster of such an age and place?

“Surely not. Say rather, ‘Oh! my soul, come not thou into their secret.’

252“It is true indeed that our weights and measures in the present day require some remodelling; but how shall it be done? Not by uprooting all our traditions—cutting ourselves loose from the past. No, we must come back to the perfection of the long past of sacred history; of that religion which proves that our race is not the result of a spontaneous natural development, but that man came from his Maker a living soul.

“But where shall we find such perfection?

“I answer,” continues Mr. Latimer, “in the Great Pyramid of Jeezeh. For within that grand primeval pillar of stone have been found the standards of weights and measures, earth-commensurable, and so assimilated to our own ancient and hereditary system, that it does seem as if the Almighty Himself had given them to us as an inheritance, to be kept precisely for the emergency of the present day and hour. And I beg that our American fellow-citizens will most carefully examine into this subject, deeply worthy of their attention.

“Shall we indeed find our weights and measures there? I can confidently answer,” says the desecndant of Hugh Latimer, “that they are there. The inch is there; the yard is there; the cubit or arm of 25 inches is there; our year is there; our Sabbath is there; Christ is there; our past, our present,—yea, perhaps our future.

“But let no man judge for you in this matter. The subject is too deeply important, indeed too vital to our nationality. Let every citizen study for himself.”

Now this point which the children of the Pilgrim Fathers in America have just arrived at, is exactly that which we are about to essay in the next four chapters. But it is proper, before we begin upon them, to confess and point out to Great Britain, that the United States are in a remarkable position of advantage in this matter; for they have the figure of the Great Pyramid 253of Jeezeh stamped on the reverse of their National seal; as thus alluded to by Mr. Latimer:—

“When a man or a nation adopts a seal, it is understood that the most significant of all emblems, for them, is placed thereon. We look to the seal to give us the clue to the origin or genealogy of the wearer or owner. And if ‘there is a Divinity that shapes our ends, roughhew them how we may,’ surely a Divinity directed the hand and inspired the mind that wrought our seal, that of these United States,—a Pyramid unfinished, with the all-seeing eye (set in the now invisible, New Testamental, topmost corner-stone) above it. Reminding us perchance, of the rock whence we were hewn, and of that Omniscience which has guided us and brought us to our present glory and honour as a nation; reminding us too, that we must look to that wonderful monument of stone for our origin, our history; indeed our weights and measures.

“What other nation has such a seal? Will the Great Pyramid speak to those whose measures are not there? The Pyramid speaks in inches. Will this be intelligible to those who have thrown away their ancient traditional birth-right, destroyed their old measures,—and make it a penal offence now, for their sons to use any other than the French metrical system?”

In this spirit then, we are to examine, what the Great Pyramid weights and measures, really, truly and practically, are.