METRIC REFORM.
[To Tam EDITOR OP TIER " EPTCTATOR:1
Sin,—Mr. Moores says in your issue of August 13th England has the best unite in the world for manufacturing purposes. I suppose he means the units of length, for few maintain that the stone, pound, two kinds of ounce, drachm, dram, pennyweight, grain, &c., are better than the gram and kilo- gram. It is usually the inch that the defenders of our present customary measures (popularly called "British ") ask us to admire. The inch is really a Roman measure ; it came into use here for the same reason for which the millimetre is now coming in,—namely, that it was in general use on the Continent. Even its name is foreign. The only true English measure for the handicraftsman is the yard, divided into eighths, sixteenths, &c. However, a good deal of existing stock and machinery is dimensioned in inches or fairly simple fractions of it, and Mr. Moores and his friends are afraid we want them to scrap that stock ; that is why they say so loudly and so often that the inch is a good unit. They do not seem to object much to the destruction of all our other weights and measures (including the yard); indeed, many of them actually propose it, in order to set up a new lot based on the inch. Mr. Moores himself has proposed such a system. But the inch is not really convenient even in manu- facture, except to folk who have never manufactured with anything else. It is too large for small work and has to be subdivided, and we Britons have never yet agreed how to subdivide it. Lines and barleycorns are taught to children ; quarters, sixteenths, and sixty-fourths are used bewilderingly and indiscriminately in workshops ; and science and delicate industry use tenths and thousandths. Eighths, tenths, and twelfths are liable to be confused; and I have known an eighth and a sixteenth confused. I have also heard the depth of a drill-hole read off as "seven inches and three-eights (eighths) and a sixteenth and a thirty-second and a sixty- fourth." Surely "190 millimetres" would have been easier seen and easier said. A carpenter or smith receiving instructions often has to note down, or carry in his head, ten or eleven figures in fractions of an inch where four or five would have been enough in millimetres without fractions. Still, it was really very unkind of you to print Mr. Moores's letter in type just one millimetre high.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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