Sir F. Bramwell, Bart, F.R.S.,[1] the famous engineer, speaking of his experience in Egypt, in the service of the Khedive, where he worked alongside French engineers, said he "was struck with the want of facility with which their calculations were done."
Turning to quite another field of operations, we hear much about the convenience of the metric system in scientific calculations. That this system is largely, almost exclusively, used by scientists must be admitted. Some, it is true, simply follow in the footsteps of others; some, merely to give a tone of science to their books. It has also been pointed out that until within the last forty years or so the bulk of the scientific teaching was done on the continent, that many of the best professors got their knowledge there, and that they were brought up in the metric system, and have kept to it. Now, a distinguished chemist, Dr. Hurter, chief of the United Alkali Company's immense laboratories, familiar with both methods, and at that very moment using the metric system against his inclinations, wrote, that for analytical purposes—“I have no hesitation whatever in saying that there is no benefit in the metric unit of weights and measures; for analytical purposes the grain is in every way a superior unit. . . . In many operations the decimal system is of enormous advantage, but it is
- ↑ The death of Sir F. J. Bramwell has been announced since this was written. He had been president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1888). He was also a civilian member of the Ordnance Committee of the War Office since its inauguration in 1881.
