MONEY.
The franc. It weighs five grammes. It is made of nine-tenths of silver, and one tenth of copper. Its tenth part is called a decime, and its hundredth part a centime.
One measure being thus made the standard of all the rest, they must be all equally in variable ; but, in order to make this certainty perfectly sure, the following precautions have been adopted. As the temperature was found to have an influence on bodies, the term zero, or melting ice, has been selected in making the models or standard of the metre. Dis tilled water has been chosen to make the standard of the gramme, as being purer and less encumbered with foreign matter than ci,mmon water. The temperature having also an influence on a determinate volume of water, that with which the experiments were made was of the temperature of zero, or melting ice. The air, more or less charged with humidity, causes the weight of bodies to vary : the models which represent the weight of the gramme have, therefore, been taken in a vacuum.
10. It has already been stated that the divisions of these measures are all uniform, namely, by tens, or decimal fractions ; they may, therefore, be written as such. Instead of writing, 1 metre and 1-tetilh of a metre, we may write, 1 m. 1.
2 metre and 8-tenths,-2 m. 8.
10 metre and 4-hundredths,-10 tn. 04.
7 litres, 1-tenth, and 2-hundredths,-7 lit. 12, etc.
Names have been given to each of these divisions of the principal unit ; but these names always indicate title value of the frac tion, and the unit from which it is der:ved.
To the name of the unit have been prefixed the particles deei, for tenth, centi, lor hun dredth, and milli, for thousandth. They are thus expressed : a decimetre, a deci litre, a decigramme, a decistere, a declare, a centimetre, a centilitre, a centigramme, etc. The facility with which the divisions of the unit are reduced to the same expres sion is very apparent ; this cannot be done with any other kind of measures.
11. As it may sometimes be necessary to express great quantities of units, collections have been made of them in tens, hu.ndreds, thousands, tens of thousands, etc., to which names derived from the Greek have been given : namely, deca, for tens ; hecto, for hun dreds ; kilo, for thousands ; and 9nyria, for tens of thousands ; they are thus expressed : a decametre, a decalitre, etc.; a hectometre, a hectogramme, etc.; a kilometre, a kilogranzme, etc.
The following table will facilitate the re duction of these weights and measures into our OWD : The Metre is 3.28 feet, or 39.371 in.
Are is 1076.441 square feet.
Litre is 61.028 cubic inches.
Stare is 35.317 cubic feet.
Granzme is 15.4441 grains troy, or 5.6481 drams avoirdupois.