THE INDUSTRY OF ALL NATIONS.

to such a Babel of known and conjectured measures. There is a deplorabletyranny of conservatism, a solid front of inert unreason, a lazy supplication forslumber in the endurance of bearable ills, a stupid sense of nationality, and animperception of internationality, which rise up in leaden confronting against allthoughts and proposals of improvement, by recourse to a system of universalstandards, based on direct and ever-possible comparisons with nature’s immuta-ble units. One would think that while the area of human knowledge is expand-ing with such wondrous rapidity, it would be esteemed a precious riddance, torelieve young memories from that heavy burden of confusing names of measuresnow imposed by the commercial necessities of life. Did a single universal set ofstandards prevail among all nations, the instruction of youth might well embraceone or two more real sciences or arts than is now possible, and commerce wouldbe simplified to an inconceivable extent. Yet desirable as it surely is to attain aworld-wide agreement in the use of one set of standards, hopeful aspirations can-not hut he chilled by a view of the immense difficulties which obstruct the reali-zation of this end.

Academy of Sciences to establish a system of measures based on nature, andmarked by no offensive nationality which could obstruct its universal adoption.England was cordially, hut fruitlessly solicited to participate in this movement.The Academy had commissioned Borda, Lagrange, Laplace, Monge and Condorcet,to devise and arrange such a system. In proceeding to execute this trust, the Com-mission considered the claims of three natural length units. The first was theseconds pendulum in latitude 45°; the second, the quadrant of the equator, andthe third, which was finally adopted, was the quadrant of the meridian. Eachof these is a natural constant, subject to no change while the existing cosmicalarrangements prevail. An absolute measurement of a terrestrial quadrant is indeedan impossibility, hut its value is mathematically deducible from a limited portion,on determining a correct value of the earth’s spheroidal compression; a value,however, not even yet precisely known. It seems to us that Eater’s pendulum,made perfectly compensating, in vacuo, and referred to a standard locality, asGreenwich for instance, with a thoroughly compared sub-standard locality ineach country, gives a natural unit, decidedly preferable in many respects to one

UNITED STATES MINT BALANCE.

The first attempt at fixing a natural, accurate, and universal standard is dueto that eminently sagacious philosopher, Huygens. His profound analysis of thependulum made him familiar with the beautiful property first demonstrated byhim, that the distance between the centres of suspension and of oscillation is abso-lutely constant in all pendulums vibrating in equal times under equal forces ofgravity. As he perceived, the correction for gravity variations with the latitude,can readily he applied with a good degree of precision. Cassini proposed anatural unit derived from a great circle of the earth. But the time for actionwas still in waiting. Confusion and uncertainty of measures were to be meeklyendured throughout Europe, until the French Revolution came rushing on,deranging all the old habits of the most scientific of nations, putting under banthe prestige of the past and infusing a young life into the masses, potent enoughto overpower the inertia and ignorance habitual with the toiling millions.Then at last, it became possible to resolve and to act with that over-masteringenergy which was requisite to final success.

In 1790, on motion of Talleyrand, the National Assembly ordered the

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derived from the subdivision of any possible arc on the earth’s surface. A recur-rence to an original pendulum unit could be had by an easy experiment, either toreconcile discrepancies, or to restore lost and to verify distrusted standards. Butto recover a fraction of a meridian arc, would require a repetition of the pro-tracted geodetic operations in which the unit originated. There would seem tohe no possibility of independent determinations by the pendulum on the samespot, giving values disagreeing to the extent that units derived from different arcmeasures would. Already the original platinum metres of France, fabricated bya mercurial process, are believed to have undergone an appreciable change, attrib-utable to a residual traoe of mercury. Moreover, subsequent arc measurementsshow that no single arc can be correctly assumed as a standard for others, hutthat metres derived from different arcs would differ very sensibly, though notenough to impair a commercial unit.

How are the French standards now to be verified ? By arc re-measurement, orby comparison with the Committee iron metres, or with the contemporary Academypendulum determinations ? Perhaps the pretensions of different standards may