on Wednesday next, the 22d inst., the President of the Board of Trade
is to receive a deputation from the Decimal Associations and others to
urge on the Government, not merely the adoption of the decimal system
of notation, but the compulsory application within two years of the
metric system of weights and measures in its entirety. I have been
hoping to see a letter in the Times from some person of importance
calling attention to this deputation. I fervently trusted I should
notice one from your correspondent, Mr. Herbert Spencer, who, a year
or so back, contributed a series of thoroughly well-thought-out and
logical articles, exposing the fallacy of the metric system; but if
any such letter has appeared I have, unfortunately, missed it. I
believe this agitation to be largely due to scientific professors who
have been brought up on foreign books, and have found it too much
trouble to convert foreign measurements into English; further, due to
the promptings of a number of foreign merchants, forming (happily, or
unhappily) now so large a portion of our traders-men who, also, do not
wish to take the trouble of converting foreign weights and measures
into English. As regards the suggestion, made time after time, that
the metric system is one giving the greatest simplicity to
calculations, I say unhesitatingly, from very considerable experience,
that it is one absolutely subversive of mental arithmetic, and I
appeal to anybody who has ever had the misfortune to wait at the
_guichet_ of a French railway station while the clerk inside has been
calculating the total amount to be paid for two first-class and one
second-class from "A" to "B" with a piece of chalk, or pencil and
paper, to compare the speed and the certainty of this process with the
answer that he would get at Euston, or at any such station in Great
Britain, and say which system shows by results the advantages in point
of time and in accuracy. The French themselves, as has been pointed
out on more than one occasion, find the metric system too irksome, and
they evade it. According to the metric system, one of its great merits
is that you can state every required quantity by multiples or
submultiples of ten--metre, 1; decimetre, 0.1; centimetre, 0.01;
millimetre, 0.001. But no Frenchman thinks of expressing himself in
this way. Instead of 0.01, he says cm. 1. For a millimetre, he says
mm. 1. When he comes to large weights, does he not commonly abjure the
1,000 kilos and write one tonne? When he comes to domestic weights the
kilogramme is found too large; the half of this, the practical
equivalent of the pound, is wanted. He ought to write 500 grammes. He
does not. He abjures his decimals, and writes one half kilo. But I
feel I must not take up your space by multiplying instances, so well
known to many who have studied the subject, of the unbearable burden
of the decimal _plus_ metrical system compulsorily carried out. I well
know the value of decimals, and the indispensable need of their use in
many circumstances; but I object to being compelled to use them when
they are not needed and are in the way. I find it easier to state
seven eighths, and to deal with it mentally, than to put it into the
form of .875. I do not wish to be restricted by law in the use of my
tools. What would be thought of the law which compelled a shipwright
on all occasions to use a chisel, and never to employ the adze. I,
with, I believe, every upholder of English weights and measures, and
of the use of fractions, am quite willing that the metric system
should be made legal in its entirety throughout Great Britain; but we
are not willing that the useful weights and measures which we can
employ with so great facility and accuracy should be made illegal.
Let the two exist together, and experience will prove which is the one
preferred by the community. I am, sir, your obedient servant,
FREDERICK BRAMWELL.
5 GREAT GEORGE STREET, WESTMINSTER, S. W.,
_March 18, 1899_.
P. S.--Very probably the old stalking-horses will be trotted out on
Wednesday, and the President of the Board of Trade will be told of the
confusion created by the existence of mere local weights and measures.
I believe that if those who cite these anomalies were asked to give
instances at various dates it would be found that these local weights
and measures were dying out. In any event they are illegal, and are
not obligatory upon anybody. Every man can claim to deal according to
the standards of length, of weights, and of capacity. Most certainly
the introduction of the metric system would largely add to the use of
illegal weights and measures, not only locally, but generally. If the
inquiry were made in France, even no farther off than Boulogne, it
would be found that, in the markets there, dealings are frequently
carried out on a local system unconnected with the metric.--F. B.
=Variations in African Religious Ideas.=--Miss Kingsley observes, in
her West African Studies, that when you are traveling from district to
district you can not fail to be struck by the difference in character
of the native religions you are studying, and that no wandering
student of the subject in western Africa can avoid recognizing the
existence of at least four distinct forms of development of the fetich
idea. They have every one of them the same underlying idea, and yet
they differ. "And I believe," Miss Kingsley says, "much of the
confusion which is supposed to exist in African religious ideas is a
confusion only existing in the minds of cabinet ethnologists from a
want of recognition of the fact of the existence of these schools. For
example, suppose you take a few facts from Ellis and a few from
Bastian and mix, and call the mixture West African religion. You do
much the same sort of thing as if you took bits from Mr. Spurgeon's
works and from those of some eminent Jesuit and of a sound Greek
churchman and mixed them, and labeled it European religion. The bits
would be all right by themselves, but the mixture would be a quaint
affair." Of the four main schools of fetich predicated by Miss
Kingsley, the Tshi and Ewe school (Ellis's school) is mainly concerned
with the preservation of life; the Calabar school with attempting to
enable the soul successfully to pass through death; the Mpongwe school
with the attainment of material prosperity; and the school of Nkissi
with the worship of the mystery of the power of evil.
=A Natural History Society as a School.=--Among the agencies employed
by the Boston Society of Natural History for making itself a vehicle
of instruction to the public has been the employment of an educated
man and teacher as guide to the museum, who should also give lectures
there. The salary of this officer has heretofore been provided by the
bounty of Miss Harriet E. Freeman, but she has been obliged to
discontinue her contribution, and the curator is now seeking other
means of maintaining a suitably qualified assistant. The "guide," Mr.
A. W. Grabau, delivered a course of lectures in April and May, 1897,
on "The Surface of the Earth: Its Rocks, Soil, and Scenery," in which
special attention was given to the scenery in New England; and,
whenever it was practicable, excursions were made to localities which
could be used as illustrations. A similar course, delivered in 1896,
resulted in the formation during the summer of the same year of a
class of thirty persons, summer residents of Kennebunkport, Maine, who
were under Mr. Grabau's daily instruction for two weeks. The awakening
of interest in local scenery further led to his giving lectures in
Belmont and Arlington, and he thereby became instrumental in a
movement intended to preserve the local frontal bowlder moraine on
Arlington Heights--a valuable geological movement. A course of
lectures on the Animals of the Shores of New England was given by Mr.
Grabau to a class of from forty to seventy-five persons, in the
Teachers' School of Science, with excursions on Wednesday and Saturday
afternoons. In a similar fall course attention was given specially to
the study of animals in their various habitats. A course by Mr.
Grabau on the use of the microscope and the preparation of specimens
was followed by ten days' laboratory work in Limekilns Bay, Maine. One
of the results of a winter course on zoölogy, to a class of twenty
teachers, was the formation of the Hale House Natural History Club, in
connection with which field meetings are held, classes for children
are formed, and papers upon elementary subjects are read and
discussed. Other courses of lectures are mentioned in the report of
the curator of the society--the field lessons in geology, by Professor
Barton, with a winter course in historical geology; the course of Dr.
R. W. Greenleaf, on the elementary structure and function of the parts
of flowering plants; the course of the curator (Alpheus Hyatt), on
elementary zoölogy; and the lectures on geography, by Prof. W. M.
Davis.
=Glacier Water.=--An analysis of two samples of water from the
Illecilliwaet Glacier, in British Columbia, was recently made by F. T.
Shutt and A. T. Charron. The water was collected a few feet from the
glacier's irregular face, about a mile and a half from the glacier
station on the Canadian Pacific Railway. The following is abstracted
from an account in the Chemical News:
----------------------------------+-----------+-----------
| No. 1. | No. 2.
+-----------+-----------
| Parts per million.
----------------------------------+-----------+-----------
Free ammonia | 0.018 | 0.018
Albuminoid ammonia | 0.027 | 0.037
Nitrogen as nitrates and nitrites | 0.0246 | 0.0442
Oxygen absorbed in fifteen minutes| 0.0396 | 0.0672
Oxygen absorbed in four hours | 0.1056 | 0.1744
Chlorine | 0.10 | 0.10
Total solids at 105° C. | 30.8 | 12.0
Solids after ignition | 30.8 | 8.0
Loss on ignition | None. | 4.0
Phosphates | None. | None.
----------------------------------+-----------+-----------
The authors go on to say: "From the above data we may unhesitatingly
conclude that the glacier water is one of great organic purity. The
samples are not identical, due no doubt to the fact that they were
collected twelve days apart, and probably from different parts of the
foot of the glacier. Both analyses, however, show that, judged by the
standards used in the diagnosis of ordinary potable waters, it is a
water possessing a high degree of purity, and one perfectly wholesome
and eminently suited for drinking and household purposes. As received,
both samples were quite murky, almost milky, in appearance. On
allowing them to stand, perfect subsidence took place, leaving the
supernatant water colorless and brilliant. A microscopic examination
of the sediment showed it to consist of very fine rock matter, chiefly
fragments of quartzite.
=Protection of Plants and Birds in France and Italy.=--Organized
efforts for the protection of native plants and birds from further
destruction are multiplying in Europe. Botanical stations for Alpine
plants have been established at several places in France and
Switzerland, and now Italy has come into line with the association
_Pro Mortibus_, which, founded in July, 1897, has already more than
five hundred adherents. Italy is probably the country where work of
this kind is most needed, for nowhere else is the destruction,
particularly of birds, so systematically, persistently, and
industriously carried on. _Pro Mortibus_ will also interest itself in
the preservation and replantation of the forests. Among other efforts
looking in a similar direction, M. J. Corcelli tells in _La Nature_ of
the establishment of shelters in connection with the schools in Saxony
where birds are fed in the winter, and of lessons given to the
children inculcating regard for them. A great deal has been
accomplished in France without much noise in rewooding the devastated
slopes of the mountains and erecting efficient safeguards against
ravage by torrents--largely by restraining the torrents at their
sources; and the Alpine forests of the country, M. Corcelli says, "are
again rising from their ashes." Reserves of Alpine plants have been
established by the Belfort section of the French Alpine Club on the
_Ballon_ of Alsace; the central section is creating an extensive
botanical garden in the Vosges, to serve as a place of refuge and
propagation and multiplication of species threatened with extinction.
The city of Annecy, in Savoy, has recently voted the money required
for establishing a similar garden on the verdant ridges of the Semnoz.
Two local societies in Italy are engaged in a similar work, one of
which has established the garden museum Chamousia on the slopes of the
Saint Bernard, where plants from the Pyrenees and the Himalaya are
also collected. Switzerland is not behind either of these countries in
this work.
=Tortoise Shell.=--The following interesting account of the
tortoise-shell industry is taken from Nature: The tortoise shell of
commerce is obtained from the horny superficial plates overlying the
bony case of the great majority of tortoises and turtles. Turtles
differ from tortoises in the heart-shaped form of the upper half of
the shell, and the conversion of the limbs into paddles adapted for
swimming. The upper part of the shell carries a median row of five
large superficial horny plates, flanked on either side by a row of
four or five still larger flat plates; these thirteen or fifteen large
plates affording some of the most valuable commercial tortoise shell
in the particular species whose shell is in most demand. On the front
and hind edges of the upper bony shell and the portion connecting the
latter with the plastron, or lower shell, are a series of smaller
horny plates, generally twenty-four in number, which are sharply bent
in the middle and are known in the trade as "hoof." The under surface
of the shell of a turtle carries six pairs of large, more or less
flat, horny plates, for which the trade term, derived from their
uniform color, is "yellow belly." In value they sometimes exceed all
but the very finest of the large upper plates, generally known simply
as "shell." Of the host of land and fresh-water tortoises, most of
which are of comparatively small size, the horny plates (which, by the
way, are altogether wanting in the so-called soft tortoises of
tropical rivers), on account of their thinness and opacity, are now of
no commercial value, at least in England. Moreover, it is by no means
all species of marine turtles which yield commercial tortoise shell.
Of these marine turtles, exclusive of the great leathery turtle, there
are three well-marked and perfectly distinct types, severally
represented by the green or edible turtle, the hawksbill, and the
loggerhead. The hawksbill furnishes the most valuable shell. The
largest and best plates, which are in the middle of the back, are
about a quarter of an inch thick in the center, and measure about
thirteen by eight inches, their weight being from about half a pound
each to as much as one pound. The length of the carapace (the upper
shell) in the hawksbill is about forty-two inches. It is found in all
tropical and subtropical seas. From a dead turtle the plates of
tortoise shell can be readily detached by beating. The highest price
realized during 1898 in the London market was about 112_s._ 6_d._
(about $28) a pound for the very best selected shell. It is stated
that 76,760 pounds of hawksbill shell were sold in London in 1898. The
shell is very readily workable, being made partially plastic by
immersion in hot water.
=Poison in Wild Cherry Leaves.=--Instances having been brought to the
notice of the directory of the New Hampshire College Agricultural
Experiment Station of cattle presumably fatally poisoned by prussic
acid from eating wild cherry leaves, the subject has been investigated
by Fred W. Morse and Charles D. Howard. Five species of wild cherry
grow in New Hampshire, of which the red cherry and the horse plum are
not regarded as dangerous, and the dwarf cherry has not been examined,
but is strongly suspected. The wild black cherry is the most noxious
species, and the chokecherry is not far behind it. The poisonous
principle in these cherries is hydrocyanic or prussic acid, which,
however, does not exist in the leaves as such, but is derived from the
amygdalin they contain. The popular opinion that only the wilted
leaves are specially dangerous is not borne out. The authors found
both wilted and fresh leaves poisonous, and the dried leaves worthy to
be regarded with suspicion. Vigorous, succulent leaves from young
shoots, which are the ones most likely to be eaten by cattle, are far
more poisonous than the leaves from a mature tree or stunted shrub.
The largest amounts of prussic acid were derived from leaves wilted in
bright sunlight to about seventy-five per cent their original weight,
or till they began to appear slightly limp and lose their gloss.
Leaves wilted in the dark were much less dangerous.
=Dr. Brinton's Contributions to American Linguistics.=--At the
suggestion of the late James Constantine Pilling, Dr. D. G. Brinton
has prepared an analytical survey of his contributions in the field of
American linguistics, which have now extended over forty years. The
list includes seventy-one titles of books and papers, of which sixteen
are classed as general articles and works. The first four of these are
occupied with the inquiry whether the native American languages, as a
group, have peculiar morphological traits that justify their
classification as one of the great divisions of human speech. Dr.
Brinton finds a feature--incorporation--which, under the form
polysynthesis, is present in a marked degree in nearly all of them.
Another paper shows that the various alleged affiliations between
American and Asiatic tongues are wholly unfounded, and another pleads
for more attention to American languages. A volume of nearly four
hundred pages--The American Race--was the first attempt at a
systematic classification of all the tribes of North, Central, and
South America on the basis of language. It defines seventy-nine
linguistic stocks in North America and sixty-one in South America,
pertaining to nearly sixteen hundred tribes. Other volumes in the list
include writings, preferably on secular subjects, by natives in their
own languages. One contains a list of native American authors, and
notices some of their works. Another vindicates the claim of native
American poetry to recognition. These works were followed by the
Library of Aboriginal American Literature, of which eight considerable
volumes were published, each containing a work wholly of native
inspiration, in a native tongue, with a translation, notes, etc.
Fourteen other publications relate to North American languages north
of Mexico, thirty-two to Mexican and Central American languages, and
ten to South American and Antillean languages. Many of these articles
were collected in 1890 and published in a volume entitled Essays of an
Americanist. It was arranged in four parts, relating respectively to
Ethnology and Archæology, Mythology and Folklore, Graphic Systems and
Literature, and Linguistics. The value of Dr. Brinton's labors will be
realized by all persons who know how rapidly things purely native
American are passing away.
=Metallic Alloys of Rich Colors.=--A remarkable alloy of gold
seventy-eight parts and aluminum twenty-two parts, discovered by
Messrs. Roberts-Austen and Hunt, has a characteristic purple color
which can not be imitated; for if the designated proportions of the
constituents are varied from, the base is entirely changed. The
compound lacks somewhat in the qualities of resistance and
malleability. The color is abnormal in that it partakes of none of the
color features of its constituents, as is the case in most
combinations of metals. Thus, the colors of copper alloyed with zinc
or tin pass gradually from red to white, according to the proportions
of the constituent metals. In the union of two metals of white or
bluish-white color, like zinc, tin, silver, and aluminum, the color of
the alloys is not perceptibly different from that of the
components--that is, it continues white. The purple of the gold
aluminum alloy is not, however, the only exception to this rule.
Aluminum gives highly colored compounds with several other metals,
even when the second metal is clearly white. In the experiments of
Charles Marcot, of Geneva, in alloying aluminum with platinum,
palladium, nickel, and cobalt, combination took place abruptly at red
heat, with the development of an intense temperature and a partial
combination of the aluminum; and when platinum is the second metal, an
explosion is liable to occur. An alloy of seventy-two parts of
platinum and twenty-eight of aluminum had a bright golden or yellow
color, which varied under slight changes in the proportions of the
elements to violet green or coppery red. The alloy is hard and brittle
and of crystalline structure. The yellow form is stable, while the
other forms decompose in a short time. An alloy of seventy-two parts
palladium and twenty-eight aluminum is of fine coppery rose color,
crystalline texture, hard and brittle, and suffers no change with
time. An alloy of from seventy-five to eighty parts cobalt and twenty
to twenty-five aluminum is straw-yellow, inclining to brown; when just
formed it is externally hard and scratches glass, but is easily broken
with a hammer, and falls to a powder in a few days. An alloy of
eighty-two parts nickel and eighteen aluminum has a pronounced
straw-yellow color, is as hard as tempered steel, and resists the blow
of a hammer. The fracture, close-grained, is that of steel or bell
metal. It is susceptible of a fine polish, is stable, and keeps its
color. Though interesting on account of their colors, these alloys,
except that of nickel, are not suitable for any use.
=The Chemistry of Sausages.=--The _Lancet_ is authority for the
following: "The composition of the sausage is not only complex, but it
is often obscure. It is supposed to be a compound of minced beef and
pork. Abroad, however, the sausage is compounded of a much wider range
of substances. These include brains, liver, and horseflesh.
Occasionally they do not contain meat at all, but only bread tinged
with red oxide of iron and mixed with a varying proportion of fat.
Horseflesh is rich in glycogen, and this fact enables its presence in
sausage meat to be detected with some amount of certainty. The test,
which depends on a color reaction, with iodine has recently been more
carefully studied and with more satisfactory results, so that the
presence of five per cent of horseflesh can be detected. At present
there is no legal provision for a standard in regard to the
composition of sausages, but clearly there ought to be. Limitations
should be laid down as to the amount of bread used, as to the actual
proportion of meat substances present, and as to the coloring matters
added to give an attractive appearance of fresh meat. Sausages are
extremely liable to undergo decomposition and become poisonous, owing
to the elaboration of toxic substances during the putrefactive
process. Bad or rancid fat is very liable to alter the character of a
sausage for the worse. Thus in some instances the use of rancid lard
has rendered the sausage after a time quite phosphorescent, an
appearance which indicates, of course, an undesirable change. The
smoked sausage is a much safer article of diet than the unsmoked,
since the curing process preserves the meat substance against
decomposition by reason of the empyreumatic bodies present in the wood
smoke which is used for this purpose."