our weights and measures are a DISORGANIZATION. Naturally one
can expect a GREAT SAVING OF TIME, THOUGHT AND LABOR from the
use of a system, and this is the fact. If one dared introduce
ordinary arithmetical problems into an article like this, it
would be easy to show by examples how a person has to be
something of a master of common fractions in order to solve in
our system common every-day problems, whereas in the metric
system nearly everything is done very simply with decimals. In
our system a mechanic after making a complicated calculation
with common fractions is as likely as not to get his result in
sixths, or ninths, etc., of an inch, whereas his rule reads to
eighths, or sixteenths, and he must reduce his sixths, or
ninths, to eighths, or sixteenths, before he can measure off
his result. In the metric system results always come out in
units of the scale used. The metric system measures to
millimeters or to a unit a trifle larger than a thirty-second
of an inch. In our system one is likely to avoid sixteenths or
thirty-seconds on account of the labor of calculation. Then,
besides, the amount of figuring is so much less in the metric
system. Take the case of a certain problem to find the cubical
contents of a box. Our solution calls for 80 figures and the
metric for 35, and this is a typical case, not one specially
selected. Thus, metric calculations, while only from one third
to two thirds as long, are likely to be two or three times as
accurate, are far easier to understand, and the results can be
immediately measured off. Hence, we waste time in these four
ways. Shakespeare in Hamlet says: "Thus conscience does make
cowards of us all." In like vein it might be said: Thus custom
(in weights and measures) doth make April fools of us all. It
is no exaggeration to say that counting grown-ups solving
actual problems and children solving problems in school we are
sent on much more than a billion such April fool errands round
Robin Hood's barn every year.
Noting how much time is saved in making simple every-day
calculations by using the metric system, suppose that we assume
of the 60 or more millions of adults in active life in this
country, on the average only one in 60 makes such calculations
daily and that only twenty minutes' time is saved each day. Let
us suppose that the value of the time of the users is put at
$2.40 per day or 10 cents for 20 minutes. Then 1,000,000 users
would save $100,000 per day or $30,000,000 per year. But
perhaps some one is saying that much of this time is not really
saved, since many persons are paid for their time and can just
as well do this work as not. The answer to this is that in many
instances such calculations take the time of OTHERS as well as
the person making the calculation. Occasionally a contractor
might hold back, or work to a disadvantage a gang of a score of
workmen while trying to solve a problem that came up
unexpectedly.
An estimate of the value of all weighing and measuring
instruments places the sum at $150,000,000. Thus, we see that
in five years, merely by a saving in TIME--for time is
money--all metric measuring and weighing instruments could be
got NEW at no extra expense. This estimate of the cost of
replacing our weighing and measuring instruments by new metric
ones and of saving time has been made by others with a similar
result.
A matter of very much more importance than that just discussed
is the extra unnecessary expense put upon education, viz., two
thirds of a year for every child in the land. Presumably if the
metric system were in use with us, all our children would stay
in school as long as they now do, thus getting two thirds of a
year farther along in the course of study. Actually, if
arithmetic were made more simple, vast numbers would; stay
longer, since they would not be driven out of school by the
terrible inroads on their interest in school work by dull and
to them impossible arithmetic. If metric arithmetic texts were
substituted for our present texts, it is safe to say children
would average one full year more of education. What the
increased earning power would be from this it would be hard to
estimate, but clearly it would be a huge sum.
Consider also how much more life would be worth living for
children, teachers and parents if a very large portion of
arithmetical puzzles inserted to qualify the children to
understand our crazy weights and measures were cut out of our
text-books. If we were to adopt the metric system, literally
millions of parents would be spared worry, and shame, and fear
lest Johnny fail and drop out of school, or Mary show
unexpected weakness and have to take a grade over again;
uncounted thousands of teachers would be saved much gnashing of
teeth and uttering of mild feminine imprecations under their
breath; and, best of all, the children themselves would be
saved from pencil-biting, tears, worries, heartburns, arrested
development, shame and loss of education!
A committee of the National Educational Association has
recently reported that Germany and France are each two full
years ahead of us in educational achievement, that is, children
in those countries of a certain age have as good an education
as our children which are two years the foreign childrens'
seniors. Surely one of these years is fully accounted for by
the inferiority of our American ARITHMETIC and SPELLING. This
much, at least, of the difference is neither in the children
themselves, nor in the lack of preparation of our teachers, nor
in educational methods.
Professor J. W. A. Young, of the University of Chicago, in his
work on "Mathematics in Prussia," says: "In the work in
mathematics done in the nine years from the age of nine on, we
Americans accomplish no more than the Prussians, while we give
to the work seven fourths of the time the Germans give."
Professor James Pierpont, of Yale, writing in the Bulletin of
the American Mathematical Society (April, 1900), shows a like
comparison can be made with French instruction. Pierpont's
table exhibits only one hour a week needed for arithmetic for
pupils aged 11 and 12! As the advertisements sometimes say,
there must be a reason.
But if the children are kept in school two thirds of a year
longer somebody pays for this extra expense. Now children do
not drop out of school until they are about 12 years of age and
have both appetites and earning power. The number of these
children that drop out each year is probably about 2 1/2
millions. Of this number let us say 1 1/2 millions would
become wage earners, thus passing from the class that are
supported to the class that support themselves and earn a small
wage besides. We have then three items in this count: (1) The
cost to the state in taxes for the education of 2 1/2 million
for two thirds of a year, or $50,000,000; (2) The cost to the
parents for support of 1 1/2 millions for two thirds of a year
at $67 each, or $100,000,000; (3) The wages of 1 1/2 millions
over and above the cost of their support, say $50 each, or
$75,000,000.
The above figures are put low purposely so that they can not be
criticized. It should be remembered that 46 per cent. of our
population is agricultural, and that on the farm, youths of
from 13 to 15 very often do men's and women's work: also that
in many manufacturing centers great numbers of children get
work at relatively good wages, and that the number of
completely idle children out of school is not large.
With these figures in hand let us consider now a kind of debit
and credit sheet against and for our present system of weights
and measures.
PRESENT SYSTEM OF WEIGHTS AND MEASURES
In ANNUAL account with UNCLE SAM
Cr.
By culture (?) acquired by the
children through learning more
common fractions and our crazy
tables of weights and measures.......... $?
Dr.
To cost in school taxes of keeping 2 1/2
millions of children in school 2/3 year. $50,000,000
To cost to parents for supporting 1 1/2
millions children 2/3 year............. 100,000,000
To loss of productive power of 1 1/2
millions youth for 2/3 year ............. 75,000,000
To loss of earning power by having
children driven out of school by
difficulties of arithmetic as now
taught .................................... 25,000,000
To loss of time in making arithmetical
calculations by men in trade, industries
and manufactures.......................... 30,000,000
To extra weighing and measuring
instruments needed for sundry tables....... 10,000,000
To loss of time in making cross reductions
to and from our system and
metric system .............................. 5,000,000
To loss of profit from foreign trade
because our goods are not in metric
units ..................................... 20,000,000
------------
Total annual loss ................. $315,000,000
Commenting for a moment on the credit side of the above ledger
account, it can be said that recent psychology shows
conclusively that training in common fractions and weights and
measures can not be of much practical help as so-called
culture, or training for learning other things, unless those
other things are closely related to them, and there are not
many things in life so related to them once we had dropped our
present weights and measures.
It may be complained that the expense of changing to the new
system is not taken account of in the above table. The reason
is that that expense would occur once for all. The above table
deals with the ANNUAL cost of our present medieval system.
One powerful reason for the adoption of the metric system
different in character from the others is the ease of cheating
by the old system. In the past the people have been
unmercifully abused through short weights and measures. Many of
the states have taken this matter up latterly and prosecuted
merchants right and left. Nine tenths of this trouble would
disappear with the new system in use.
Let us consider now for a little time the reasons why the
metric system has not been accepted and adopted for use in the
United States. Evidently the great main reason has been that
the masses of the people, in fact all of them except a very
small educated class in science are almost totally uninformed
on this whole question. Such articles as have been published
have almost invariably appeared in either scientific, technical
or educational magazines, mostly the first, so that there has
been no means of reaching the masses, or even the school
teachers with the facts. For another reason the United States
occupies an isolated position geographically, and our people do
not come into personal contact with those in other countries
using the metric system. But there is still another potent
reason. After the United States government legalized the metric
system in 1866, all the school books on arithmetic began
presenting the topic of the metric system, and, quite
naturally, they did it by comparing its units with those of our
system and calling for cross reductions from one system to the
other. No better means of sickening the American children with
the metric system could have been devised. Multitudes of the
young formed a strong dislike for the foreign system with its
foreign names, and could not now be easily convinced that it is
not difficult to learn. Every school boy knows how easy it is
to learn United States money. The boy just naturally learns it
between two nights. The whole metric system UNDER FAVORABLE
CONDITIONS is learned nearly as easily. By favorable conditions
is meant the constant use of the system in homes, schools,
stores, etc. These favorable conditions, of course, we have
never had.
In 1904 an earnest effort was made again both in this country
and Great Britain to have the metric system adopted for general
use. The exporting manufacturers in both countries grew much
concerned over the whole situation. A petition to have the
metric system adopted in Great Britain was signed by over
2,000,000 persons. A bill to make the system mandatory was
passed by the House of Lords and its first reading in the House
of Commons. The forces of conservatism then bestirred
themselves and the bill was held up. Forseeing a movement of
the same kind in this country, the American Manufactures'
Association got busy, laid plans to defeat such movement which
they later did. Strictly speaking this action was not taken by
the association as such but only by a part of it. One fourth of
the membership and probably much more than a fourth of the
capital of the association was on the side for the adoption of
the system. Politically, however, the side opposed to the new
system had altogether the most influence.
Careful study of the whole matter showed that the main cost to
make the change to the new system would be in dies, patterns,
gauges, jigs, etc. A careful estimate put this cost at $600 for
each workman and assuming a million workmen, we have a total
cost of $600,000,000. But we have just seen that the annual
expense of retaining the old system of weights and measures is
over $300,000,000. Thus we see that two short years would
suffice to pay for what seems to the great manufacturers
association an insuperable expense. From all this we see that
the question is not one for N. M. A. bookkeeping, but for
national bookkeeping.
Many well-informed people studying the matter superficially,
think the difficulties in the way of a change to the new system
insurmountable. Thus, they think of the cost to the
manufacturer--which we have just seen to be rather large but
not insurmountable; they think of the changes needed in books,
records, such as deeds, and the substitution of new measuring
and weighing instruments. Germany and all the other countries
of continental Europe made the change. Are we to assume that
the United States can not? That would be ridiculous. Granting
that commerce has grown greatly, so also has intelligence and
capability of the people for doing great things.
Scientists are universally agreed as to the wisdom of the
adoption of the metric system. The country, as a whole, must be
educated up to the notion that sooner or later it is sure to be
universally adopted, that it is only a question of time when
this will be done. Already electrical, chemical and optical
manufacturing concerns use the metric units and system
exclusively. The system is also used widely in medicine and
still other arts. Then all institutions of learning use the
metric system exclusively whenever this is possible. All that
is needed is to complete a good work well begun.
There is one rational objection to the metric system and but
one. It is that 10 is inferior to 12 as a base for a notation
for numbers, but the world is not ready to make this change nor
is it likely to be for generations to come. Moreover, this
improvement is far less important than uniformity in weights
and measures. For these reasons this objection can be passed
over. Men said the metric system would never be used outside of
France; but it has come to be used all over the world. The
prophets said we should never have uniformity as regards a
reference meridian of longitude. But we have. And so it will be
with the adoption of the metric system in the United States and
Great Britain. It is only a question of whether it comes sooner
or later. When that day comes, the meter, a long yard, will
replace the yard, the liter, the quart (being smaller than a
dry and larger than a liquid quart), the kilogram will replace
the pound, being equal to 2.2 pounds, and the kilometer (.6
mi.) will replace the mile. Within a week or so after the
change has been made to the new system, all men in business
will be reasonably familiar with the new units and how they are
used, and within a few months every man, woman and child will
be as familiar with the new system as they ever were with the
simplest parts of the old. So easy it will be to make the
change as far as ordinary business affairs are concerned.
However, for exact metal manufactures years will be needed to
fully change over to the new. Here the plan is to begin with
new unit constructions and new models, as automobiles using new
machinery constructed in the integral units of the metric
system. All old constructions are left as they are and repaired
as they are. This was the plan used in Germany and of course it
works.
In conclusion it can be said that we started with the idea that
the change to the metric system was needed for the sake of
foreign commerce. We now see that we need it also for our own
commercial and manufacturing transactions. If we are to have
the efficiency so insistently demanded by the age in which we
live, then we must have the metric system in use for the
ordinary affairs of daily life of the masses of the people, we
must have it in commercial and manufacturing industries, and we
must have it in education. If efficiency is to be the slogan,
then the metric system must come no matter what obstacles stand
in its way.
ADAPTATION AS A PROCESS
BY PROFESSOR HARRY BEAL TORREY
REED COLLEGE
FOR the physicist and chemist the term adaptation awakens but
the barren echo of an idea. In biology it still retains a
certain standing, though its significance has, in recent years,
been rapidly contracting, as the influence of the conception
for which it stands has waned. Many biologists are now of the
opinion that their science would be better off entirely without
it. They believe it has not only outlived its usefulness, but
has become a source of confusion, if not, indeed, reaction.
Darwin's first task, in the "Origin of Species," was to
demonstrate that species had not been independently created,
but had descended, like varieties, from other species. But he
was well aware that
such a conclusion, even if well founded, would be
unsatisfactory until it could be shown how the innumerable
species inhabiting the world have been modified, so as to
acquire that perfection of structure and coadaptation which
justly excites our admiration.
To establish convincingly the doctrine of descent with
modification as a theory of species, it was necessary for him
to develop the theory of adaptation which we now know as
natural selection.
The origin of adaptive variations gave him, at that time,
little concern. Though keenly appreciative of the problem of
variation which his studies in evolution presented, he
dismissed it in the "Origin" with less than twenty-five pages
of discussion. Such brevity is not surprising, since a more
extended treatment would only have embarrassed the progress of
the argument. In fact, his restraint in this direction enabled
him, first, to avoid the difficulties into which Lamarck, with
his bold attack on the problem of variation, had fallen; and
second, by doing so, to deal the doctrine of Design a blow from
which it has never recovered.
The latter was a service of well-nigh incalculable value to the
young science of biology--and, as it appeared, to modern
civilization as well. But it has not been uncommon, from
Aristotle's day to this, for the work of great men to suffer at
the hands of less imaginative followers. Sweeping applications
of Darwin's doctrine have been repeatedly made without due
regard either for its original object or for the success with
which that object was achieved. So I believe it to be no fault
of Darwin that the growing indifference of European
laboratories toward natural selection should find occasional
expression in such a phrase as "the English disease." Disease,
indeed, I believe we must in candor admit that devotion to it
to be which blinds its devotees to those problems of more
elementary importance than the problem of adaptation, which
Darwin clearly saw but was born too soon to solve.
The problem of species has profoundly changed since 1859. For
Darwin it was perforce a problem of adaptation. For the
investigator of to-day it has become a part of the more
inclusive problem of variation. Along with the logical results
of natural selection he contemplates the biological processes
of organic differentiation. He is no longer satisfied to assume
the existence of those modifications that make selection
possible. In his efforts to control them, the conception of
adaptation as a result has been crowded from the center of his
interest by the conception of adaptation as a process.
The survival of specially endowed organisms, the elimination of
competing individuals not thus endowed, are facts that possess,
in themselves, no immediate biological significance. Selection
as such is not a biological process, whether it is accomplished
automatically on the basis of protective coloration, or
self-consciously by man. Separating sheep from goats may have a
purely commercial interest, as when prunes and apples, gravel
and bullets, are graded for the market. Such selection is, at
bottom, a method of classification, serving the same general
purpose as boxes in a post-office. Similarly, natural selection
is but a name for the segregation and classification that take
place automatically in the great struggle for existence in
nature. The fact that it is a result rather than a process
accounts, probably more than anything else, for its remarkable
effect upon modern thought. It is non-energetic. It exerts no
creative force. As a conception of passive mechanical
segregation and survival, it was a most timely and potent
substitute for the naive teleology involved in the idea of
special creation.
As a theory of adaptation, then, natural selection is
satisfactory only in so far as it accounts for the
"preservation of favored races." It throws no light upon the
origin of the variations with which races are favored. Since it
is only as variations possess a certain utility for the
organism that they become known as adaptations, the conception
of adaptation is inevitably associated with the welfare of
individuals or the survival of races. To disregard this
association is to rob the conception of all meaning. Like
health, it has no elementary physiological significance.
Our profound interest in the problem of survival is natural and
practical and inevitable. But in spite of Darwin's great
contribution toward a scientific analysis of the mechanism of
organic evolution, and in spite of the marvelous recent
progress of medicine along its many branches, the fact remains
that so far as this interest in the problem of survival is
dominant it must continue to hinder adequate analysis of the
problem of adaptation. Indeed, it is in large measure due to
such domination in the past that biology now lags so far behind
the less personal sciences of physics and chemistry. For
survival means the survival of an individual. And there is no
doubt that the individual organism is the most conspicuous
datum in the living world. The few who, neglectful of
individuals and survivals, find their chief interest in living
substance, its properties and processes, are promptly
challenged by the many to find living substance save in the
body of an organism. Thus, in a peculiarly significant sense,
organisms are vital units. And since the individual organism
shows a remarkable capacity to retain its identity under a wide
range of conditions, adaptability or adjustability comes to be
reckoned as the prime characteristic of life by all to whom the
integrity of the individual organism is the fact of chief
importance.
With the use of the words adaptability and adjustability, our
discussion assumes a somewhat different aspect. Instead of
contemplating further the mechanical selection of individuals
on the basis of characters that, like the structure of "the
woodpecker, with its feet, tail, beak and tongue, so admirably
adapted to catch insects under the bark of trees," can not be
attributed to the influence of the external conditions that
render them useful, we are invited to consider immediate and
plastic adjustments of the organism to the very conditions that
call forth the response. For the fortuitous adjustments that
tend to preserve those individuals or races that chance to
possess them, are substituted, accordingly, the direct primary
adjustments that tend to preserve the identity of the reacting
organism. We turn thus from the RESULTS of the selection of
favorable variations to the biological PROCESSES by which
organisms become accommodated to their conditions of life.