Certain members of the same society are still at work
on what has been a tedious task--the restoration of the standard yard,
rendered necessary, as you will remember, by the destruction of the
original in the Parliament-House conflagration, more than ten years
ago. The work proceeds slowly but surely, as the extremest pains are
taken to insure accuracy, the measurements, bisections, and
graduations being read off with a microscope. When finished, it will
be centuplicated or more, if necessary, and, as is said, a copy
deposited in every corporate town in the kingdom. This restoration of
the standard is not so easy a task as would be commonly supposed, for
apart from the determination of the yard with mathematical accuracy,
alternations of heat and cold have to be taken into account; for, as
is well known, a strip of metal which measures thirty-six inches long
in a temperature of 70 degrees, will not measure the same in 50
degrees. Connected with this subject, it was stated at one of the
meetings of the society, that the ancient Saxon yard was nearly
identical with the modern French _metre_; whence a suggestion of 'the
possibility of the Saxon yard being actually derived from a former
measure of the earth, made at a period beyond the range of history,
the results of which have been preserved during many centuries of
barbarism.
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