, are joined to numerals, to indicate {138} quantities; a mistake of these, by either prescriber or apothecary, may prove fatal. A case in point occurred a few years since, well known to many of our readers. A physician, prescribed cyanide of potassium, by a formula in which
had been printed, by mistake, for
. The apothecary, instead of sending him the prescription for correction, as he ought to have done, put it up and sent it with the fearful monition that the dose would prove fatal—and so it did—to the prescriber himself, who took the dose his patient dared not touch. He died in five minutes, a victim to a printer’s error, to his own self confidence, to want of etiquette in the apothecary, and last, not least, to an ill-contrived system of weights.
This brings us to the practical question, What is to be done? All agree that there ought to be a reform. On this point we can do no better than quote the close of Mr. Alexander’s preface.—“Finally,” says he (page vii.) “if I may be allowed, in connection with this work and its appropriate applications, to allude to certain dreams of my own, (as they may be; although I consider them capable, without undue effort, of a more prompt and thorough realisation than seems to be ordinarily anticipated,) as to the prevalence, some day, of an universal conformity of weights and measures, I must acknowledge that such a result was one of the ends I had in view in the original collection of materials. Not that such a work was going to show more emphatically than business men feel, and reflecting men know, the importance of such an universal conformity; or that a book whose pages deal in discords, could, of itself, produce unison; but the first step to any harmonious settlement is, to see clearly, and at a glance, where the differences lie, and what they are.—If a millennial period for this world is ever to come, as many wise have deemed, and pious prayed, it must be preceded by one common language, and one common system of weights and measures, as the basis of intercourse. And the way to that is to be built, not by the violent absorption of other and diverse systems into one, but rather by a compromise into which all may blend. When the Earth, in her historical orbit, shall {139} have reached that point, (as it stood ere mankind were scattered from the plain of Shinar) and not till then, may we begin to hope that her revolutions will be stilled, and that before long the weights and measures of fleeting Time will be merged and lost in the infinite scales and illimitable quantities of Eternity.” We are not sure that we precisely understand the last sentence, and we are sure we dissent entirely from the one that precedes it. No compromise can be of service in bringing about a uniformity in weights and measures. We must either make a better system than the best extant, and ask all men to adopt it, or if the best that human ingenuity and science can devise is already in use, so much the better; let us adopt it with all our heart. Is the French system this best one? We believe it is, nor have we ever heard it called in question.—Why then speak of a new one as desirable? We fear the suggestion is the offspring of a national vanity, which ought to be beneath us. We would not oppose such a motive even to the introduction of the centigrade thermometer, which is much more inconvenient than Fahrenheit’s, and has no one advantage over it in any respect; still less should it bar the progress of a system against which no fault can be alleged, but that it is foreign.
We agree with our author that the introduction of a new system is much easier than is generally supposed. It will not be like the change of a monetary system, where the old coins remain, mingled with the new, to perpetuate the old names.—The change could be, by law, effected next New Year’s day, and all inconvenience from it would be over in a month, save some awkwardness from habit, and two more serious difficulties. One is from the human propensity to bisection. Thus the old hundredweight of 112 pounds is bisected down to 7 pounds, and the grocer will sell half this quantity, 31⁄2 pounds, at a cheaper rate than he will sell 3 pounds or 4. Unfortunately in bisecting 100 we run down too soon to the fractions 121⁄2 and 61⁄4. The French have been obliged to give way to this propensity, and divide the kilogramme in a binary manner, {140} with an unavoidable irregularity, reckoning 311⁄4 grains as 32. Would that 32 × 32 = 1000! Our only remedy is to change the radix of numeration from 10 to 16, a thing impossible but to a universal dictator. The other difficulty is in our measure for land. This must remain in all surveyed tracts in such a shape that 40 acres, and also 5 acres, shall be some multiple of unity.
But shall the apothecary wait the action of government?—This is neither necessary nor desirable. Some relief he ought to have speedily. If he dare not make so great an advance as to adopt the French system, (his truest and most honorable policy,) let all subdivisions of the avoirdupois pound be discarded, except the grain. Introduce the chemists’ weights of 1000, 500, 300, 100, 50, &c. grains, and let all prescriptions be written in grains alone. This, perhaps, is the only feasible course.
We must return once more to our author before taking leave of our readers. The motive for making the collection was one that strikes us as new. It was for ethnological and historical purposes. As the carat points to India as the origin of the diamond trade, so we find in the names, mode of subdivision, and amount of weights and measures evidences of the migrations of races, and of the ancient and obsolete channels in which trade once flowed. The care with which Mr. Alexander seems to have corrected these tables, and adjusted the discordant elements of which they are composed, and corrected the discrepancies between them, makes them more worthy of reliance than anything that has preceded them, and leaves little to be desired that is within the reach of human attainment. After the alphabetical arrangement, are given the weight and measure systems of the “principal countries of the world,” beginning with Abyssinia and ending with Würtemberg. And we have only to add that the mechanical execution of the volume is worthy of the care and labor the author has spent upon it, unsurpassed, in fact, by any book made for use we have ever seen.