e Magna
Charta, which proclaims that 'there shall be one weight and one
measure.' 'We will and establish,' said an act of Edward III. nearly
500 years ago, 'that one weight, one measure, and one yard, be used
throughout the land.' Act has followed act from that time to this, and
still we have not only different weights and measures for different
commodities, but for the same in different parts of the realm. An
ounce means one thing to the grocer, another to the apothecary. A
stone is 8 pounds to the London butcher or fishmonger, 14 to the
provincial; 5 pounds to the dealer in glass, 16 to the cheesemonger,
and 32 to the dealer in hemp. The corn-trade exhibits still greater
varieties. Prices are quoted in official circulars in every fashion,
from the Mark-Lane quarter to the Scotch boll, the firlot, the load
(which may be of various dimensions), the coomb, the last, the barrel
(which also may be various), the ton, the hundredweight, and the
pound. We have seen an extract from an actual account-sales, by which
it appeared, that at the same port the merchant had sold a cargo of
foreign wheat by five different bushels according to the customs of
the buyers. In paying the duty, these various bushels had to be
converted into imperial quarters, and in calculating tonnage and other
dues, it was necessary to reduce all to tons! Here is surely a source
of endless confusion, if not an opening for fraud. Our legislature has
gone on from century to century, mending or mutilating the statutes as
the case might be, but laying down no principles scientific enough to
command the approval of the educated, or simple enough to prevail over
the established usages of the commonalty.

Our neighbours in France, who are particularly fond of framing
theories and experimenting on them for the edification of other
nations, availed themselves of the general upturning of affairs in
1789, to introduce a universal decimal system, to be applied to
everything whatever that could be counted, weighed, or measured. They
started from the measurement of the globe itself, and took as the
basis of their whole system the ten-millionth part of a quadrant of a
meridian, equal to 39-371/1000 inches English. This they called a
metre (measure), and to it, as a unit, they prefixed the Greek
numerals to express increase in the decimal ratio; thus decametres,
tens of meters; hectametres, hundreds of meters; and so on. To express
diminution in the decimal ratio, they u