Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1872 Excerpt: ... TITLE XXI. WEIGHTS AND MEASURES. The systems of weights and measures in actual use among different peoples, stand to each other in no simple numerical relations; and the transformation of values from one of these systems to another, is ordinarily an irksome and time-consuming operation. No common system could therefore be substituted for all these, which would not stand to them or to most of them in the same relation of inexact commensurability in which they stand to each other. But there is hardly a transaction of practical life into which considerations of weight, or measure, or both, do not enter; and such is the constitution of the human mind that clear conceptions of quantities of an kind are unattainable, except by reference to unit values, which education or long use has made familiar. It matters not how thoroughly we may have been instructed in the denominations of weight and measure employed by other peoples, or how earnestly we may have endeavored, by the study of their visible types placed immediately before our eyes, to acquire the power of directly conceiving positive values, when expressed in these: experience teaches us that our notions thus acquired continue long to be vague and inexact; and that, in order to render them definite, intelligible and satisfactory, we involuntarily seek to transform them, by reductions founded upon relations which, if not true, are at least approximate, into values which long habit has taught us to associate directly with determinate quantities of the objects valued. The substitution, therefore, anywhere, of a new system of weights and measures for the system actually in use, founded as the new system must be, if it is to become a common and international system, upon a basis which will generally bear no simple ...
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